The Toll of the Seven Bells

in #poetry6 years ago (edited)

Mid-July, I remember the dismal display  

The pinnacle of our emotional array  

Was in that dismal display that I found a sanctuary of sorts  

A distant calling from some distant port  

Deviant of lost wonder and hope  

Left to dangle by the hangman's rope     


I remember the dismal Mid-July noon  

Ignorant and naive a sleeping buffoon  

"To what misfortune do I owe this recollection?"   

"This painful loss of suicidal perfection."  

The words come as illusion or dream  

Decadently gloomy and vaguely obscene     


Can I help this mind locked within the tomb?   

Helpless as a child perched in a mothers' womb   

I remember the redness of that pagan sky  

On that most dismal night of Mid July  

We became one with the dangler on the rope  

A memory of the one dangling from the rope     


A lighted fire and ominous song  

As we dragged the soul from what was strong   

We watched the sky, singed with tainted fear   

Cry out the skies; ashed with the sear  

I walked from a shadow into the night  

Shaken from the omniscient light     


Burdened with the songs of dying life   

Unforgiven of sins long tormented in strife   

I caressed the pinnacle of emotional array  

I longed to live; I longed to love; I longed to stay  

"Taste of the wicked intervention dejected soul."   

"And be gone by the seventh bells' toll."           


I felt to inhale prolific vanity from the night  

My shadow wept in that early morn light  

A distant voice carried the din of the cathedral bell   

"You must be gone; returned to the brimstone of hell"   

"Where all things are seared by the eves' sun"  

I would never again lay witness to that horizon   

Again it rises and I have held firm by the gallows pole   

Prey of the vultures I hear the seventh toll

![church-3058372_640.jpg]() Image: Pixabay.com