Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (A Movie Poem)

The absence of love
makes one a villain
in other’s hearts.

In the proposal
the weeping willow
sheds its leaves
to the sky,

while in the bowels below
the servants of the earth
forge war,

pull iron from earth
as it screams
to be reclaimed.

Above, silk napkins
unfold into laps
with a curt snap of wrists.

Into the depths
the princess falls,
into the opposite of heaven.

She opens her eyes
to the evil above her, around her,
near her, pouring out
like bearings onto sheets of gold.

“Maybe,” she thinks,
“we can exist
without fear of war?
Find a way together?”

This is no fairy tale,
but yet this
is precisely a fairy tale.

She dreams of her wedding
where all are invited
and all are expected.

She can see butterflies
swirl around her wedding gown,
her face reflected in a golden bowl,
the bloom of thousands
of attending fairies.

But yet, she is still falling,
full with the wisdom
that the spindle
curses everything it touches

and that her subjects are locusts
fated to swarm the earth
a thousand years
enduring the evil promised them,

until she burns herself out,
the last blood of the Phoenix,
destined from ashes to be transformed.