Lies forged from blooms of steel
And quenched in blood,
Their last hopes interred
In the womb of a murderous gift.
Breathe silence
Lest sands painted crimson in rage
Would betray their guise.
Beyond the twilight of a crumbling star
Awaits beauty’s scorn;
Her flight redeemed
By the sails of a kingdom adrift.
Scalded in vengeance…
Doomed love.
*
vic briggs 
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Wonderful imagery. Simultaneously soft and jagged, like a serrated knife wrapped in lace. You wowed me 😉
“a serrated knife wrapped in lace.” My turn to be wowed 🙂 Thank you, Ned.
“By the sails of a kingdom adrift.
Scalded in vengeance…
Doomed love”.
Seems I am always quoting your last lines, but seems they are always (for me) the most powerful.
Thank you, Lance. I had to battle through quite a few variants until I finally found the lines I was searching for, so I am grateful for your feedback. It is always a delight when verse resonates.
Such a powerful verse – you can really feel doomed love’s victims’ pain (great to ‘see’ you, Vic!) 🙂
Thank you, Lee-Anne. Always a pleasure to see you too. My novel stole me away for a while. I’m at the climax stage and it is difficult to tear away from it at present.
This is an epic poem (and I don’t mean it in the modern, slangified “epic” sense), chock-full of passion and savagery. Beauty wars with brutality: hopes are interred in wombs and love, doomed, is scalded in vengeance. A buffet for the mind and the senses here, Vic!
Dear Leigh, thank you. I have been re-reading Virgil’s account of the Trojan war and before reaching the second paragraph the imagery was so vivid in my mind’s eye that I had to commit it to the page.
Kinda works for Cleopatra and Marc Antony.
I’m glad you think so, Kavalkade. I deliberately avoided the mention of “Troy”, “Helen” and that Greek horse that may identify the poem too closely with its source of inspiration 🙂
I like to beat Trojans myself when able!
http://articles.latimes.com/1992-12-30/sports/sp-2537_1_fresno-state
If a tie could be arranged, and we still get to say that we won, that would be ok as well! 😉
That certainly sounds like a plan. 😉 Let me know how you get on.
They beat us in our last bowl game in December!
There’s always next year!
We have beaten them 2 out of 3 lifetime games though. haha.
Oh, us beating them is like some little regional soccer club beating ManU.
So it’s a pretty big deal actually. For college sports… LoL.
Apparently I am chatty cathy today. LoL. 😉
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“Their last hopes interred
In the womb of a murderous gift”
my best lines…
Thank you, Topazo. Perhaps it is no accident that so many phrases associated with that war have permitted our cultural consciousness.
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Powerful and written with great personal feeling. This poem really sucks one in.
Thank you, Chris. I experimented with the “historian’s viewpoint”, while trying to avoid the detachment usually associated with it. It appears that I have just about struck the hoped-for balance.