But deceptive blood-robed pomegranates
With their piteous decay, and sullen seeds
Packed as kids’ taut skins in sand-tinted crates;
With bloom, with ruin, and sweet as reeds
Them reeds naught know of plain parched mourn
As wails it and yields to their illiterate lips;
As stumbles then snakelike out— thin and worn.
Begotten unwanted, poorly fathomed, forgotten wisps
Of old, odourless leisured hours,
That scrubbed, so gruntled, and scratched the fruit.
Then white silks soft within parched blue days;
And no heirs birthed, sublimed the flowers.
Touch it; the crumple and crêpe is not yet soot
If it could bleed, it could bloom alive, ablaze.
29/09/2021
After ‘Grief’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
[I wrote this when I was bored in the English lecture. Originally, I intended to keep the rhyming scheme the same as Elizabeth's, but I messed up. I forgot that it was a,b,b,a and not a,b,a,b... Well, by the time I realised that, I was done writing].
I just hope her ghost is not cursing me right now.
