Poem for April 9

Today’s Poem-A-Day challenge for National Poetry Month is a Two-for-Tuesday prompt. Again, credit for the challenge goes to Robert Lee Brewer of Writer’s Digest. He challenges us to write one of the following (or both):

• Write a hunter poem.
• Write a hunted poem.

My offering for today is about both the hunter and the hunted:

The Vampire

He invades her dreams at night, cold and quiet as the grave.

Turning toward him, she sees those dark features transformed

Into the face she knows only too well — but no —

She turns away again, she closes her eyes against the thought.

She mustn’t know. She must forget.

He must remain a figure cloaked in mystery,

A nameless phantom from some morbid legend found in books,

Or else she could never face the dawn.

For if she has no hope that he will vanish with morning’s light,

Where then is she safe?  Where can she hide?

 

More than once she has thought how strange it is

To be haunted by a vampire with such sad eyes.

He comes, and stands there, and watches her in the dark

(As she has so often sensed him watching her in the day):

And he tells her, not in words but through grotesque pantomime,

How he will regenerate himself by degenerating her innocence.

But how can she tell him, as she shivers in pity and dread,

Trapped in a helpless limbo where sleep and wakefulness merge,

That she would gladly drive the stake through his heart herself,

If she did not fear breaking her own as well?

 

 

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