October Poem by John Lars Zwerenz

OCTOBER
The duchess reclined on her purple divan
Smoking in her chamber, overlooking her bower by the sea
And placing in her credenza her embroidered diary,
She gazed beyond to the meads where the wan
Grasses played in the palm of the tepid breeze.
The winds rose up through the boughs of the poplar trees,
Rising to her bastion's walls, to the moonless turrets,
Caressing its ashy parapets,
When, suddenly, in despair she witnessed on her knees
A harbinger of perdition:
A most dreadful apparition,
For through her windows' flowing curtains came
An angel bearing an infamous name.
His figure spread out like a lifeless cloak
Over the carpet of her cold, old room
In the solitary, October gloom
Arising from the wood,
From a leafless, lonely, accursed oak.
And doing all she could,
She did not succeed in breaking free
As she ran in horror down the stony stairs
In the terrible, Zoroastrian airs
Of Beelzebub's fiery, infernal, black glee.
Now she sleeps in a tomb
In the soil at her castle's feet.
And every soulless soul that she does meet
Resonates only wailing - and her womb
Carries naught but a black and perpetual fear
As demons whisper in her ear.

JOHN LARS ZWERENZ
[EXCERPT FROM 'THE GRAVE & OTHER POEMS'] Copyright 2021 AABS Publishing * TO BE RELEASED THIS WINTER