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

23

Night's dark veil falls upon a couple's encounter on a glistening backstreet
the clatter of heels, the chime of laughter, peel off the jacket.
Too young and carefree, too consumed in passion to even blink
as Venus casts her shadow.
Creatures of the night awake!
The creeper,
we bid it farewell but still it returns, the ghastly blighter.
The cloaked one,
unidentifiable, slinks like a practiced predator and has hands that seize.
And the one that waits in slumber,
making neither sound nor movement
only sleeps and waits,
waits...
to drag them to their death bed.

© 2010 Florence Challender