I exhale in terror. Or is it simply exhaustion?
I huff and wheeze a thin cloud of fog to rub away
yet another smudge on Athena’s prized shield.
I feel anything, but heroic, hypnotized by the glare.
Breathtakingly beautiful. A pun, as if anyone had time for stale humor.
I choke on my own dry throat as the soft sounds of serpents intensify,
sibilant and seductively, they writhe.
Holding fast, the tension builds.
My mind rehearsing, how was it again…
thrust and parry, stick and move,
who am I kidding?
In my modern life I am no warrior,
but time tests us all.
In this reflection left is right; it’s disorienting.
I can never remember. So much like cutting my own hair in the bathroom mirror.
I always get the movement wrong at first, then second,
and then finally a mediocre job at best.
In her chamber I am surrounded by history,
ancestors, well, relics really.
A still audience that withholds its applause in silence.
Are they rooting for me? I cannot tell.
I feel like they would, but who knows?
Maybe they want me to fail too.
Unseeing witnesses; their marble eyes look through me
as if time itself were stealing their attention away
like a bored date at a drive in movie.
I feel submerged. Like all tombs,
it’s a cavern of earth filled with the damned.
Trampled by surly steps under the braggartly feet of the living.
Stone monuments deservedly worn, looking down their chipped noses at me;
jealously blind to those still breathing in the world.
So many limestone slabs, like cicada shells clinging to the verge.
Hollow, crumbling remnants of a noisy, ugly world.
Of the years and seasons, and the lovers long departed.
Testaments to fabled monsters that only a glimpse within a gilded shield reveals.
We tell ourselves that yesterday’s villains could never live in our antiseptic age.
That time has delivered us from such evil.
Here we are perversely transposed,
the reverse of what we see.
This gorgonic madame is far closer than she appears.
by D. Ryan Lafferty
Literary Crumbs: Poems & Short Stories to Savor by D. Ryan Lafferty 