Stones, Bridges, and Blades: Three Poems of Legend and Lore

The Lucky and Broken

Why do they all look so upset?
After all, summer sunsets off 
Sarpedon’s emerald edge
are all fire, clouds, and thorny light.
It’s enough to dazzle and confound 
any painter from any era.
The surrounding sea is Greek-turquoise, 
a perfect blending of azure and teal, 
as if the two colors would never 
drift completely apart. 

Beyond the beautiful view, couldn’t they enjoy
the great warrior parade? 
An endless bronze line of chest plates, 
gauntlets, greaves, spears, swords,
daggers, axes, cleavers, and shields.
They’re all legend, sharp, muscle-bound,
and eager for a swing at the serpent queen. 
Her snakeskin crown is the hissing bullseye. 
She molds them into another cradled root
in her expansive, petrified forest. 

They’re frozen, seized, and 
captured in prisons of stone
or rubble strung across her acropolis lair. 
Many rocks were once standing statues, 
tall and wide like opaque sunflowers. 
Never withering or blooming,
always grimacing and gasping, 
until she shattered them into silver crumbs.
She’d juggle them cackling, or roll them down 
her serpent tail, like a scaly mountain road.  

The debris knows those fresh statues
are begging for a return to normality.
They should all be grateful, 
an unchanged body, mind,
and perspective staring over
seaside breezes, star-flushed nights,
racing rails of dolphin fins, and billowing anchovy tails. 
Their host, all abomination and forked tongue
is generous in her preserving gaze. 

Why can’t they see it?

The Sounds

The murmur of wind on the English countryside,
the sprinkle of horse hooves over 
weathered wood and Roman-mortared stone.
Maybe the growl of engine pistons 
clapping on the long roads between hills,
and crowds of cricket on Boxing Day. 

It could never tell the difference
wherever the troll hid, lurked, stalked
and hunted in its foothill forest domain.
Those fiddles, purrs, salutes, and sobs,
all rackets and slabs of hubbub.
A din that can’t be filtered by its monster heart.

The myth stands in a copper-nickel coat,
with coral white teeth, gnarled and bud.
And bandages of scarred flash on its back
from the few ancient knights with quick swords
who hewed, hacked, then whimpered 
at his church door frame. 

Laughter and screams could be both
sides of the same coin. This troll has one.
It’s mystic, grimoire, and devil stamped. 
He claw-flips it to rearrange the
streets and trails, till they always intersect
with his cobblestone-bridge lair.

Before he drags a traveler beneath,
they could be talking, remembering, dreaming,
laughing, screaming, all matters of noise. 
Till they're silent, stuffed, and salted 
in a green of motionless fluid 
in his endless pickling jars. 

When you’re miserable, hungry, 

and alone,

it all sounds the same.

The Bloody Blade

The sword’s breakfast is always blood.

That old samurai in the orange-shingled shrine
at the mountain’s empty lap,
against silky winter, snow, and icicle stars,
sits with his haunted castaway,
a steel-child, perpetually nursing on his lap.

Every morning below the plucked
seams of silver rock and crag that
surround his home, he sits in cliffside air,
the blade ready for its feeding of crimson
nectar dripped off the sunrise skin.

Without this daily sliver of scarlet dewdrops,
the whole of this phantom armor would crystallize,
pulled from their cursed tombs in nearby caves
till a full suit, gauntlet to greaves, would be hilltop wandering,
a spiked shell always hungry for a bloody birthright.

The veteran warrior gives the sword centerpiece
a taste to suppress this eternal feast,
a cut on a finger or arm, a generous valley in his skin.
His hide a scarred bark of feedings
to this permanently starved artifact.

No better nursemaid for a ghoulish cleaver
than a retired warrior,
a parent keenly aware of their vampiric child,
as the lightning knows the thunderhead.
He cannot blame nor dismiss this violent appetite:

he’s felt it too.