Poem: A Violet Rain: I, II, and III

A Violet Rain

By Lana Bella
QuailBellMagazine.com

Little Winged Things

The low-dug hole was to be her potter's field
along with a jarring army
of crickets and mosquitoes' purr;
jagged stones carved into her blistered cuts
as sallow dust veiled a faint coating upon the sooty
curls.
She watched the drainage of the outside light concealed 
the skirting bay,
speckled glow where mooring boats beamed like 
pied cinders from heavens high,
then she gazed into the underpass of emptiness
that enslaved her a loath chattel,
once more the insight kept its mantle closed,
leaving her naive and cold. 

If she had stayed longer,
she would have been exhausted of all her flesh
in that blank grey tomb.
But instead, she'd burrowed down the turning bends
of the folding rocks,
stolen away through 
the open cracks of the abyss,
crawled upon her shabby clothes,
chased the darting mouse to the ramshackle wall
tore carelessly at the moist dirt with her red-painted nails 
and out the blackness' caress she tumbled.

Her head cocked towards the sky, 
briny air tasted of fermented fish and smoky tails 
of autumn wind,
while the loom of sickle moon barely showed
behind the ample spread of clouds.

So dark she'd nearly missed the bale of dew
dispersing from the faint iron smoke of his 
lit cigarette's end.

 Soon the chase took flight,
she, darting into the shadows with
the shades hastily drawn, while the thick
shrubberies tore at her gathering sleeves 
and crumbly stone felled her escape.
He, an incurious silence in resigned gait, came into view
above her, 
a tall, slow-moving mass of rancid breath, 
crouching, sneering, questioning her bold defiance.

With pained whispers and hollow sobs followed from
the chasm’s bed,
she groped in vain on fear-spattered hope, steeling
against the winged demons that rose from all around
seeing yet not sensing 
the flying-underbelly swing 
of his steel blunt bat.

The Hands of Guillotine

Fear is the bloom where the nectar
of life and death that breathes and grows.
Once she was his blissful flames, and gladly dressed
his Bordeaux wine in the chamber bed;
now, she's wrought of the autumn leaves and 
guillotined time;
as he looked down the crimson river seeping
beneath her fractured head laying in soundless sleep
besides the dense underbrush, he understood:
not all that is lost will be remembered
not all that is feared will be triumphed
and not all that he's slain will sooth the beast within.

 When the gray beach belted his suspension woke
then hurled him over the unflecked calm
he scanned from the sea to the tied channels and
the muddy marsh lay veiled, to the mangled girl at his feet.
So in the depths of an evening cold, 
he hauled her yielding form to the watery grave,
where the eager creek flowed and a hundred runs streamed,
curving past a violet tree rooted deep in the bedrock shore.

Within the space of lurking specters bred:
clad all in gold, that seemed a temptress best, she skied an oar
across the liquid earth
shepherded forth by the floating mildew of horsetail reeds
when wet dirt grazed her lips, and stole away in her throaty peals;
violet scent trailed the air in gasping rivulet into
the hours and the days and the years and the sweeping breadth
of the stirring pond.

A Violet Rain

A violet-haunted rain
tumbled down the trickling boughs and leafy bulge,
of the violet tree;
There, an old man knelt, cowering by the gnarly roots
at the bark's edge where a spider web 
strung wrinkly and wet.

Thirty years had come to pass and still,
he heard her screams in all his dreams:
at times distantly, like muffled sounds trapped 
in a lidded glass bottle,
as if it was fished out and clogged of black water 
from being interred beneath a floating bed of horsetail reeds;
while other times, her keen tempest's howl depleted whole his sanity,
parching him from the inside out like a desert 
spanning over miles without sheltered trees or fresh drinks;
then of late, it has constantly been a down-trodden rain coasting this violet tree
by the millpond's shore,
where plum-hued petals scattered upon a basin swirling of red;
in failed swigs of shallow gasps,
she fumbled for the cotton hem of his plaid button-down shirt
and always caught the marshy waste
of the dark, 
vainly keeping steady upon the last loose scaffolds of her life as it
hung across the vacant air;
he watched her weak thrashing in numb silence, 
falling, gurgling, submerging deep into
the muck;
ever so casually,
he flicked away a dull pang of shame as it sloshed, danced, rippled, then at last 
sunk softly beneath the silent water along with
the final breaths bleeding out of her scarlet-painted nails.

Here again under the violet rain,
that water-logged throaty voice and the few remnants of mortality 
staggered on prawn-like legs with rawboned hands,
she reached out stroking the spreading paralysis
that had started to press backwards into his tongue and down his throat, 
giving birth to his own strangulation.

#Unreal #Poetry #Imagery #MortalJourney #Death #Karma #Drowning
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