I think it was Richard Pisciotta, that started the alphabet meme (correct me if I am wrong). This is not exactly the challenge, but I believe it is close. The constraint here is first letter alphabetically for every line of the poem. Cheers... :) A dreadful tale Anyways, as young boys we never lacked adventure. Being near the bay, we made the water a second home, the woods, the pond, the fresh little stream. Children don’t have a problem with imagination. Down low, where the oak limb bends just licking the smooth skin of the water, is where we buried all the dead things. Eels and snakes, squirrels and rabbits, things that we found on the road or ones that the older boys killed with slingshots, and arrows and steel pellets. For what reasons, we could hardly know, and dare not ask. Gunning they called it, scouring the hill for anything that moved, this was sport to them. Hell to all the things that tried to live without a safe place to hide. I remember once, a tiny yellow bird bleeding in my hand, jackrabbits, chipmunks, and even neighborhood dogs and cats. “Killing is what we like to do”, that is how they put it if anyone asked. They would leave the dead things for us to gather, for us to perform the ritual, for us to grieve for their little lives. Moonlight would splash on our little graveyard when we buried at night. No one knew exactly where we hid it; precisely where we did it; we did not want any surprises. Only the youngest of us had any fear, only the youngest were worried of the consequences. Perhaps we knew, from the beginning, that it could not go on forever. Quickly, all too suddenly, the situation took a turn for the worse. Running through the woods all day and night rapidly took its toll. Sickly and weak we knew we could not keep up with the task. Tired, so completely worn down, we slept. Under the ancient black oak with the hundred-foot crown we slept. Voraciously we slept, violated in dream and thrown to the void we slept, we slept as if we had never known sleep before. Wounded and weary and wobbly we lost all sense of time. Xenophobic?, perhaps we were. Yes of course we were. Zoned out, lonely and frightened little zombies we were.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:55:49 +0000
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