audientvoid13:The Vampireby Conrad AikenShe rose among us where we lay.She wept, we put our work a
audientvoid13: The Vampireby Conrad AikenShe rose among us where we lay.She wept, we put our work away.She chilled our laughter, stilled our play;And spread a silence there.And darkness shot across the sky,And once, and twice, we heard her cry;And saw her lift white hands on highAnd toss her troubled hair.What shape was this who came to us,With basilisk eyes so ominous,With mouth so sweet, so poisonous,And tortured hands so pale?We saw her wavering to and fro,Through dark and wind we saw her go;Yet what her name was did not know;And felt our spirits fail.We tried to turn away; but stillAbove we heard her sorrow thrill;And those that slept, they dreamed of illAnd dreadful things:Of skies grown red with rending flamesAnd shuddering hills that cracked their frames;Of twilights foul with wings;And skeletons dancing to a tune;And cries of children stifled soon;And over all a blood-red moonA dull and nightmare size.They woke, and sought to go their ways,Yet everywhere they met her gaze,Her fixed and burning eyes.Who are you now, —we cried to her—Spirit so strange, so sinister?We felt dead winds above us stir;And in the darkness heardA voice fall, singing, cloying sweet,Heavily dropping, though that heat,Heavy as honeyed pulses beat,Slow word by anguished word.And through the night strange music wentWith voice and cry so darkly blentWe could not fathom what they meant;Save only that they seemedTo thin the blood along our veins,Foretelling vile, delirious pains,And clouds divulging blood-red rainsUpon a hill undreamed.And this we heard: “Who dies for me,He shall possess me secretly,My terrible beauty he shall see,And slake my body’s flame.But who denies me cursed shall be,And slain, and buried loathsomely,And slimed upon with shame.”And darkness fell. And like a seaOf stumbling deaths we followed, weWho dared not stay behind.There all night long beneath a cloudWe rose and fell, we struck and bowed,We were the ploughman and the ploughed,Our eyes were red and blind.And some, they said, had touched her side,Before she fled us there;And some had taken her to bride;And some lain down for her and died;Who had not touched her hair,Ran to and fro and cursed and criedAnd sought her everywhere.“Her eyes have feasted on the dead,And small and shapely is her head,And dark and small her mouth,” they said,“And beautiful to kiss;Her mouth is sinister and redAs blood in moonlight is.”Then poets forgot their jeweled wordsAnd cut the sky with glittering swords;And innocent souls turned carrion birdsTo perch upon the dead.Sweet daisy fields were drenched with death,The air became a charnel breath,Pale stones were splashed with red.Green leaves were dappled bright with bloodAnd fruit trees murdered in the bud;And when at length the dawnCame green as twilight from the east,And all that heaving horror ceased,Silent was every bird and beast,And that dark voice was gone.No word was there, no song, no bell,No furious tongue that dream to tell;Only the dead, who rose and fellAbove the wounded men;And whisperings and wails of painBlown slowly from the wounded grain,Blown slowly from the smoking plain;And silence fallen again.Until at dusk, from God knows where,Beneath dark birds that filled the air,Like one who did not hear or care,Under a blood-red cloud,An aged ploughman came aloneAnd drove his share through flesh and bone,And turned them under to mould and stone;All night long he ploughed. Wow -- source link