wb :

I actually dared to start on an epic poem one day. The first two bits are here, presented for you viewing pleasure. Number four from the backlog bore!

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1.

If one were to look upon the plains
Of ancient, scarce and barren gains
Upon the very road to Rome,
One might find a man far from home
Who left his life long far behind
And wandered as a wanderer blind-

Our Traveller (we shall name him not)
Had long the fount of wisdom sought;
From Life to Death, all puzzled him
And Good was but a vague form, dim
While Evil intrigued not his tired soul
He, who had travelled to the worldly poles

Had seen enough of mice and men
That he preferred to abhor those damned
And seek instead on the nomad's path
Perhaps some Light that had eluded Wrath
And clung to the world, still weakly shining
A fleeting stormcloud's quicksilver lining,

But still that poor man found Wisdom eluded,
By all of the wise, and all the deluded-
No mortal he met knew the secrets of Life,
Nor answered the mysteries of Death and of Strife;
They heard but the call of the end of their days,
Those false pretenders to Gods scorched of clay.

In the beginning, he thought they were true-
But that belief he soon began to rue,
For in all of humanity's fleeting empires
For all their stone walls and towering spires
None lasted long enough in endeavour
To convince that their Truth was a Truth of Forever.

Great cities, old ports, vast armies in line
All wasted away before scything Time;
So he left mankind's world of Temporal defeat,
And sought out the castle of Wisdom's high seat.

2.

So he journeyed forth from his brethren fools,
Cut from the World Tree's strangling noose
He blinded one eye, but now saw with the other
A nightness so black that his soul would have faltered,
If not for a moment of faint, fleeting light
He would have believed that cursed was the Sight.

With wounded of spirit and weakened of step,
That glimmer of light he treasured and kept,
And sought out a path in the cloak-covered dark;
The stones of damnation were never so stark
For he in false blindness could but feel the path,
Which, certain, was uncertainty enough.

At length, the stones grew jagged and sharp,
And hellish fires raged ahead in the Warp;
Before him, enveloped in crimson for blood
Stood the Gates of Hell, forsaken by God,
And upon the harsh steel, on a plague hung up high
Read the words of the Love which desired to Die;

"To Chaos! To Chaos! 'tis a downward slope
That offers no soul a redeeming hope;
E'en if one were to claw his way
Toward the sanguine spills of day,
The pit from which every Man is born
Renders all desperate light forlorn.

To Chaos! To Chaos! None can resist it!
The first step off the precipice steep;
And ever and ever into deepening gloom
Where only Fates and Furies loom,
Thus behold! The fall of Man
To be born and to die in darkness' land."

As the fires raged ever higher and higher,
And Demons whispered of cursed desire,
That wretched counterfeit of the Light so divine
So twisted in form, appearing as such malign
Could claim not his soul- he knew them for damned
And knew that the Fallen false burned in this land;

Nay; light such as this was no angel's kiss,
Would grant our Traveller no aeternal bliss;
So left him in horror the Hell of the Shade
To search for a blessed, benedicted glade.

Labels: poetry