At age of five became I blind
Bad nerves to blame that made me scream
Cursed I our God for act unkind
Yet all, my friend, ’twas not as seemed
The act upon heaped thoughts unkind
Turned out to have a brighter theme
Through haunts did stray the other five
To caves of dreams with golden seams
Each night I searched through halls of brine
To find fine gleams of mortal schemes
Of mine and of which beasts aligned
To trade for rank in Rule’s regime
I sit here now, a wunderkind
Thick robe of silk, in high esteem
Commander of foul masterminds
From damaged to dark Seraphim
image: “The Dowager Empress Cixi” (Tzu Hsi) by Hubert Vos.
Reblog of a poem written awhile back with Empress Dowager Cixi in mind. Read more about her here.
Brendan is today’s host of earthweal. Brendan says:
I think that is something to celebrate, and why I’m calling this challenge A FEAST OF EARTH FOOLS. Humantide’s passing is upon us: the doors are opening for the extinct and the marginalized to enter our walled city and turn things upside down. For a poem, at least.
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sometimes good follows bad
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then bad follows good
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I like your description of the dark angel. Very melodic. And the last line with “damaged to dark”.
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Thank you, Frank, for reading and your comments.
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You rocked the prompt. Your fiction is so well drawn, it feels true. Even the cadence and rhythm feel like a translation from Mandarin. The picture is perfect, and helps perpetuate reality.
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Glenn thank you so much. I appreciate your feedback and glad it resonated for you.
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This poem has a very dark feel to it, which hightens the sense of mystery. Nicely done!
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Thank you very much, Bryan. It is rather mysterious.
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That was haunting Lisa. I stumbled a bit at first, but I caught on the Yoda-esque flow, and took off from there.
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🙂 So glad you “got” it. It is rather haunting.
Especially when I went looking for a picture and that one jumped out at me, then read about her. Maybe this is her story, and the blindness is a metaphor? I don’t rule anything out in this strange, mysterious world we live in.
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I liked the mystery in your poem and you got a great rhythm going. Read that piece about the empress in the photo. The writer has a very strange idea of feminism—smoking a pipe and having wet nurses express their breast milk for her tea is feminist?
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Thank you Jane. I didn’t read the whole article. Maybe for that time it was feminist?
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I’d have screamed, anachronism. Lots of women smoked pipes throughout history. Just because the writer of the article didn’t know that she assumes this empress must have been making a point. As for the breast milk, that is just gross. She sounds like an interesting woman. It must have been hard to be taken seriously as a woman in China at that time, as everywhere else come to that…
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She went a long way from where she started and that’s what counts in my book.
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True. Shows determination if nothing else 🙂
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The poetry matches the subject’s elaborate clothing and sort of mirrors the shuttered expression that leaves us wondering….what’s going on in that world……
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I appreciate your thoughtful comment. Thank you!
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Jade- a marvelously mysterious poem, as ornate as her clothes!
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Thank you!
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I too thought it was a real story. The dark tone echoes the physical blindness, and the larger blindnesses of the human mind.(K)
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Insightful comment, Kerfe, thank you. You just never know how this cosmos works sometimes, maybe it is a real story. I hope you know what I mean.
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Yes.
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