A Forlorn Wintertide Beholden

By: Hunter Christian

The winter storm’s winds desperately howled,

Its agonizing wails wailed,

Whispering of reprimands run afoul,

If only for sake of refuge lost,

Those whispers beckoned me in come-hither taunts,

My centuries olden sanctuary to pay the cost,

And a promised respite from my past haunts,

The hauntings that,

Left my addled mind shattered,

The relentless torturing begat,

Unrelenting madness,

I remember how my trembling hands scattered,

under the guise of guilt ridden sadness,

crimson blankets of rose pedals over hallowed graves,

amidst an encroaching flank of whipping rod,

amidst the raging storm as it beaten and battered,

blown away were the rose pedals I scattered,

In its barren stead,

The whipping rod usurped – as remnants of its vile purpose – left

my clothes bloodied and tattered

*

My hands too calloused;

Although feverishly desiring to touch her body, my coarse hands

never felt her skin – the sacrament dissuaded the sin,

So to witchcraft I desperately turned,

I drank blood from a tarnished chalice,

Beaten with the whipping rod I reaped;

the bloody welts stung and burned,

The wounds seeped,

My heart wept,

Upon a bed of nails I slept,

Still, my mortal hands never touched, never caressed, never felt

her,

The only refuge existed inside the confines of the homestead,

Wood, brick, tar, plaster, and paint constructed to shelter,

The rot that time's cruelty inevitably befell her

*

During the wintertime death throes from a forlorn age,

when the madness of a winter's unrelenting rage raged,

As it sheltered us from the wintertide's alter ego masked as

summer swelter,

A southern colonial mansion's porch sufficed for a stage,

As the makeshift jailhouse locked runaway souls below in the

tormented cellar,

Father’s preaching justified the peculiar institution, and impending

retribution, as he embodied a silver-tongued sage,

Oh, how his words enraged,

Verbiage precisely chosen to rattle the animals' cage,

So that without a hesitant flinch,

The riled crowd turned into a fierce mob,

Mere moments later, the mob fell hard upon the prisoners to

lynch,

Two slave boys whose failed escape,

Fueled father's tempestuous ire,

Those poor boys falsely accused of her rape,

Befallen innocence and unbeknownst victims of my lustful

desires

*

I spoke naught,

My mind fraught,

For centuries on end,

Denied repentance I have sought,

I am reaping justice for injustices I have sown

Trapped in this middling place, idly by and by, I readily, I steadily

rot,

Amongst the whipping rod, I had wantonly cultivated and grown,

Penance bygone, be damned, beholden to, for all I have reaped, I

have willingly accepted and owned,

The winter storm's winds howl and bemoan,

God hath forsaken me naught,

My blood spilt from shorn flesh hath atoned,

Ripped and gashed down to the bone,

Amidst an endless wintertide, I am trapped here, for good,

alone.