Poe

It's a shame you were haunted by that disagreeable raven
harping on the theme of absent love—as if obsessive
grieving would bring her back. The damned bird
would not let you sleep, interrupting every catnap
with its quintessential guilt-trip cry of Nevermore.
Sweet sorrow sours when it outlasts its time.

Sailing shadowed water toward some promised haven,
you're jerked back again by the mad possessive
yellow stare, black feather-framed, the horrid word
that won't be stilled. That tyrant, that bird-satrap
gallows-croaking from the Pallas bust above the door—
no-one would have condemned its murder as a crime.

But had you somehow escaped from that terrible avian
shade, would things have been different? Dear depressive
Edgar, you were happiest when black sorrow spurred
your flanks, lashing you headlong into the last lap.
Raven wings carried you from storm to storm to shore,
soul in a fragile ship of paper, ink, prose and rhyme.

--for TOP and Poefusion

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