30

Her waxy feathers are glazed with red blood,
As she’s struck down- with sleek efficiency,
Limp and lifeless… limitless she had seemed!
From her throat is pulled a ghostly whisper.

Yet more glorious than;
The breathless, frantic squawks,
The slow suffocation in darkness,
The bright-eyed, damp, sickly terror of temporal Hell

Ah, the savage gleam in those black vacuums,
Wolf’s wicked snarling mouth not so grotesque,
As man, who wears an indifferent smile?
Its bones are groaning, its hunger dragging.

Its weakness runs deep; it dashes and leaps-
Squanders fragile life,
Alack, over this cub no-one weeps,
But Human, hark at the glum trees!


© Florence Challender 2011

29

What spell is cast around these slumb'ring walls
That the swishing snip of thicket can't break?
The bravest hearts are skewered on its thorns.
None so fortuitous to reach its doors...
Centurion Autumn gathers dead leaves,
Brings not Spring's life-kiss or Winter's release.

And who has come to wake the maiden fair?
Punished by the prick of a sharp needle,
So like the lethal point of the rose stalk.
The deceptive faerie nature spared, whilst;
Rubbled bodies tangle in its brambles
And Aurora's lips grow ever colder--


© Florence Challender 2011

28

We crash onto the ground
And all is silent, except, the rustling of leaves,
The disquietude in my heart.
And all is sweet, except, the taste of tobacco
Mingling with the cooling air.
And all is calm, except, the teeming of pestilent thoughts
Of your salacious smile.
And all is bright, except, the rapid-darkening night
as our lips lock...




Then I awake.


© Florence Challender 2011

27

The night blossoms as it claims back its fair lady,
O silent companion of mine...
She treads soft-clad, pawing cautiously the unfamiliar stage,
The pallor of the spotlight.

The whip of a bat's wing is her orchestra,
The strangled call of a bird frozen in flight,
Warns her prey to retreat into their hollows,
The moon turns away with grieved countenance.

Her eyes glow like a fire replenishing itself; the eyes of a huntress!
And her coat is as grey as the smoke that smothers,
Her body stops corpse-still,
But her tail so expressive, betrays her...

Yet when morn comes she is no longer betrothed to the darkness,
She stretches drowsily along the windowsill and rumbles contentedly,
Beguiling me with glass-green eyes; not of malice or envy,
But a rare kind of trust, a treasured love.


© Florence Challender 2010

26

When, banished is the day
I fall to Nocturne's cradle of unrest,
a shroud of white noise befalls me.
And your voice, indecipherable, although-
vociferates in my head...and leaves me cold
And your face, the fragility of your smile
half-obscured by memories decaying into fiction.
Oh! I swore I heard this voice before
and beheld this face!
On the wrong side of heaven,
where the cruel-hearted angels are exiled to
with wings of a raven which has frolicked in the snow.
And your eyes like chalcedonies, flashed back at me
drinking in the bitterness I thought only I could see.

© Florence Challender 2010

25

No death bed convert shall I make,
The heretic soul in me would only baulk at the prospect
These eyes have swallowed too much truth and the twinkling of faith has long expired.

No, I shall shirk no shame of my last ill-spent moments
Nor shall I deplore my trespasses,
For my neighbours are as Godless as I.
I shall quell all thoughts foreboding to wander to a place “hereafter”,
Pray, what could it offer?

This life’s a false promise-
A world where rich feasts on poor,
woman treads in the shadow of man,
And love shrivels in the hands of fate.

No, I shall abandon him before he abandons me
I know I am expendable, but He?

I shall butcher my heart and serve it up on the altar-
A mere returning of the favour,
For all the last breaths snatched by his avaricious grasp.
I’ll beg him for his worst, for one of Gabriel’s own to smite me down with a blow that could bring the castles of heaven crashing...

This is my exodus from a world in tatters;
Evil shall no more pluck the ripest fruits of Good’s labour,
As the lamb heart coils up with the dragons.

© Florence Challender 2010

24

Her love is a star so fragile it may burst,
the feverish glow of a lantern in the deepest dungeon,
illuminating my heart, when all else is cursed.
Her light becomes weary and flickers like a butterfly,
I oft fear our love will dwindle into cinders and die.
But still the candle burns brightly,
drips through the night.
Together, we could torch the sky.


© 2010 Florence Challender