Zombies and poetry

A wonderful combination... really wonderful... Cordite certainly picked a great theme to work with!

I'm not too sure if what I submitted for consideration is exactly up to standard. I tend to look at my poetry and be horribly self-conscious about it, especially when I've never written in that particular style before... hopefully they weren't too tragic this time around though. I decided to try a couple of different ideas - namely with or without a plot. Current pieces that were offered:

(Sappho Risen)

When memory encased you

in the hot silence of a tomb,

still you would not sleep.

Alexandria loved you once:

Fond words, gentle songs

filled your summer island, and beyond.

When your temple crumbled

to ash, arthritic and bone-weary, you

were struck dumb, banished

to suffocating dark.

You lay –

under sand

under coffin

under linen

under skin –

For thousands of years.

Mouthpiece lost,

You moved in silent dismay

From the mouths and hearts of scholars, to

The desiccated chest of a kitchen hand, a gardener, a housecat.

Those lonely spaces drew you,

Pieces, fragments of

Love lost, love kindled.

You remained, the pulse beneath

A dry chest: impossible, relentless,

patient. Dreaming of the sun,

Until, finally, bloated with years, you were

expunged from the sands;

not living, but never dead.

A sorry sight, of course –

You wreck of ancient eloquence -

but though your

quiet hosts lay forgotten,

you were cradled in the most tender of hands:

wounded by graveworm hunger,

you limp among us again.

The other poem is more wandering in focus, rather than an homage to the focus of my thesis. I kind of like how it turned out, even if in terms of plot it's fairly pedestrian:

(Only the beginning)

You sad, wet thing. Knock-kneed disintegration.

Your animal-drive scramble for half-life

does not frighten me,

Death’s starving posterchild!

Thick chunks of putrid meat

– your rot and ruin –

hit the floor with fat splats:

sombre and somehow ridiculous.

Nothing excessive is carried.

Where fantastical epigrams have spoken

of morbid, eternal beauties, curtaining

Porcelain skin with

Hair and wings and tongue and teeth

Of a glorious, hulking beast:

Romantic carnivore, ethereal predator.

yours is the true shapeshift, all

smoke and blood and madness.

Humanity decanted, you are real in your

grotesque glory -

Life and death in one.

Meat turns to food turns to life turns to meat.

Rabid beast turns on its maker,

but I am not Frankenstein to shy from my child.