NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 24: Requiem Mass

Prompt: Write an elegy – a poem typically written in honor or memory of someone dead. But we’d like to challenge you to write an elegy that has a hopefulness to it.

This was another humdinger of a prompt, not because it was any form of esoteric, but because my month started out with way too many elegies for departed friends. I think my brain just didn't want to face writing yet another one, so it stopped working (that, and having to write a second poem for the SEAPoWriMo prompts is taxing my writerly stamina to the utmost.)

I ended up writing an elegy to old ghosts, and a dead past that needed to be laid to rest.


REQUIEM MASS

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine
-- Introit of  traditional requiem mass

Twenty-five and terrified of the black hole you called a house

Which was really a trap where a monster in the wall lay in wait

With poison darts in the shape of words

Aiming at you whatever chance he could get

And you, a mermaid struggling in a net of his weaving

Believing you were only a dumb fish.

The sea rolls, swells. The years swallow themselves

And you are no longer a mermaid but Ariel on land

Dumb by choice for what you thought was love

But in reality was narcicissm twisted

To seem like love instead.

To exorcise ghosts, we lay the dead to rest

So I’m laying you to rest, twenty-five

Scatter your ashes for the winds to carry

To the four corners of the earth and beyond.

My tongue loosens, legs merging into scaled iridescence

Ariel returns to the buoyant sea.