Don’t know where this dark poem about something vaguely evil came from.
Perhaps it comes from having to take my college-aged son to get a COVID test this week, and the fear associated with potentially having that presence in the house. Despite our having been vaccinated and having done everything humanly possible, to keep it out.
I was also watching Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple “Nemesis” with Joan Hickson yesterday. She has a line, where she says something like “I believe in Good. I believe in Everlasting Life. And oh yes, I believe in Evil.”
The use of “something” brings to mind the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “…By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes…” And, of course, the eerie Ray Bradbury carnival novel of the same name (Something Wicked This Way Comes.) Here’s my contribution to that genre of dread and foreboding, as Halloween approaches.
Hope you enjoy–well, perhaps “enjoy” is not the word…
Pitch black as black can be,
Something evil waits for me.
Something evil that portends.
Something evil, in the end.
Something gossips and maligns,
Grips my soul, arrests my mind.
Something floods my heart with dread.
Something evil in my bed.
Something wicked, something cruel,
Some medieval torture tool,
Something wakes me in the night.
Something, something isn’t right.
Lord preserve me. Lord, endure.
Lord, forgive me, make me pure.
Lord, Who makes the darkness light,
Save me from this awful fright.
Empty as the bleakest plain,
Dark invades me. Like a stain,
Stirred into my deepest depths,
Till there’s nothing of me left.
Disappearing, in the black,
Blindly sensing no attack,
I slip away, a shady blur.
As if I never, ever were.
Copyright 2021 Andrea LeDew
For more spooky poems, read The Kiss and The Other Side.
I know whereof you speak . . .
In this poem you describe grippingly what grabs all of us frequently these days (and nights) and what the Germans aptly describe as EXISTENZANGST. It will be with us until our end—and that of all the other species we have managed to bring to the edge of extinction.
Thank you Margaret for putting a word to it. It is definitely a fear of having your candle of life blown out suddenly, arbitrarily. And youre right, it does feel like that fear is ever more corroborated by the evidence, as we go along.