Vamp
caryn74
A lily in a twilight place?
A moonflow’r in the lonely night?
Strange beauty of a woman’s face
Of wildflow’r-white!
Vampires—and this cannot be denied—are evil and the source of evil. The bewitchment of innocents, that whole business about turning into bats, the monotonous routine of murder, the loathsome habit of blood-drinking—those behaviors are disturbing and reprehensible, but we’ve come to expect that of vampires. It’s no excuse, to be sure, but there it is. They’re vampires—what can you expect? However, there is no justification—none whatsoever—for the poetry and prose that has, over the long years, been committed in their name by humankind.
I drew her dark hair from her eyes,
And in their deeps beheld a while
Such shadowy moonlight as the skies
Of Hell may smile.
Vampires have been a font of distressing writing for over a century. This excruciating bit of verse was laid down by Madison Julius Cawein in 1896, a year before Bram Stoker inflicted Dracula on an unsuspecting public. It’s widely accepted in literary circles that only love and cats have instigated a greater volume of ghastly poetry and prose than vampires.
Words she murmured while she leaned!
Witch-words, she holds me softly by,
The spell that binds me to a fiend
Until I die.
And not a moment too soon.
Editorial note: Cawein, who was sometimes called the Keats of Kentucky (apparently without irony or sarcasm), published more than 1500 poems in 36 volumes before dying, impoverished, at the age of 49. He is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville (which, coincidentally, is also the final resting place of Colonel Sanders).
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
