A swinging time with Edgar Allan Poe.

I can’t imagine he was particularly a party animal, but his poems are the reason I started writing. The disturbing images and beautiful rhyme are so perfectly evocative and haunting. Poe drew my attention to the power of language, and that’s where I first fell in love with words. For this blog, I’m going to put in a poem I wrote in sixth form. I was bored in a class, and recently distressed over a broken friendship so in with my disengaged mind was mulling over it. During the teaching hour a magpie fluttered onto a metal beam crossing the window and inspiration struck. Here is my own version of ‘The Raven’.

 

 

Little magpie, your life is coincidentally small, cruelly reminding me of mine,

Perched upon steel in a concrete jungle, preening, dreaming.

Your feathers twined with darkness, glistening with the skies tears,

And though you don’t fix your gaze, I know you can feel my sorrow.

 

I could easily say you are out to prey,

With a beak of melancholic grey, away,

From sunshine and laughter in which all is reflected in day,

For you seem to be the night when you flutter out to play.

 

You could be the reason my stomach hurts so,

Your deep aching pecks spreading ice with each blow.

And you could take joy in the cracks, now dispersing,

Along my childlike heart, time echoing and reversing.

 

My blood would look pretty in your feathers, a crimson gloss of pain,

So I imagine it to be what you are preening, not the hot summer rains.

I could imagine that Morrigan has sent you, hands knitted with glee,

Sensing the chaotic war that writhes within me.

 

But alas you are gone now, leaving nothing behind,

But my worry still lingers along with the tick tock of time.

Away with Morrigan; magpie, there’s no war to be won,

If you temper my fire, I will reach for the gun.