Are you familiar with Stephen King's The Dark Tower series? It's the series he dedicated his life to, and his near-death in a car accident last decade finally pushed him to finish, after he was scared he won't get to it. This series is woven into many of his books, a hint here, a reference there. He spoke of how he feels it interwoven with his life.
You may not know that the inspiration to that series came from a poem, Robert Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came".
It's only fitting then, that King's series in turn inspired me to write a couple of poems.
Well, more like 1.5 poems. I had an image crawl into my mind, and when I took to pen and paper it came as two similar but not perfectly aligned pictures. Look at them both to take in the full image.
Amidst the field of roses,
a gaunt scarecrow
grows.
King of all that it surveys.
Its skeletal shape glows
the colour of bleached bones,
amidst the blood-red
weeds.
You can see it pointing
its inviting finger at you.
And the board is set —
A match for two.
Your cloak of shadows
twirls along your path.
The roses fly
and the light falters.
A sunset birthed of Delirium.
A scream of blood-raw roses,
a gaunt scarecrow grows
in its midst
like a skeleton key.
Like a finger it both
calls and commands;
a destiny it promises to unlock
and a curse to fulfill.
From above it looks to be
a tooth,
chipped and cracked.
A hateful white.
The crows take flight
— a sunset drawn in Hell.
I can't use this image because I don't own the rights, but this is the perfect image to go alongside with the poems above, not the one I ended up using. Check it out.
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Art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics
© Guy Shalev 2007.
