Saga of Rivers and Shadows: Retribution

Soundcloud link: https://soundcloud.com/wizardofwestmarch/saga-of-rivers-and-shadows-retribution

I made a first attempt at this poem the Sunday before it went live. It was a three line stanza structure, but otherwise fairly freeform. And it simply felt out of sync with the rest of the poem. To the point I won’t do what I’ve done several times before and show the first pass. It needs to remain dead and gone.

This also proved to be the poem I’ve struggled the most to record in a very long time, if not ever. At least fifteen attempts, and when at least two of those I got to late in the last stanza before I screwed up, meant a lot of taken time. But hopefully you’ll find the final result worth it.

Then, the following day, I found new metaphors waiting for me, though as they originally occurred to me I thought nothing of the Saga, only that I needed to find a use for them, be it poetry or prose or other. But as the day wore on both problems gnawed at me, the frustration with the first attempt at the poem along with my need to use the ideas that came out of the blue in the haze of breaking the barrier between sleep and wakefulness, I realized I needed to tackle them both together. And I needed to give up on attempting to structure this poem, none I had found fit the feelings I sought to offer to anyone that might get this far in the Saga. And so I returned to free verse for a second time in this experiment, and it will not be the last.

Retribution

She stood there at the border of light and shadow
weighed down with the memories of all that came
and went against what she might have been
before the tree ripped free of her her oldest lies
and left little doubt to the truth once lost deep inside.
A past behind superimposed over a future before
where shadows of doubt lay over shadows of magic
and neither were kind in their consideration of her
yet still she stood and knew herself now to be
ready for this dark recourse that she swore herself to.

Steeped in an older promise from an older time she went
deeper and deeper into shadow where things hunted
but could not taste her scent on the air for she matched
their darkness with her own deep doubts and deeper needs.
So she made her way until at last she found the castle
where pulsing power lingered there in the air waiting
to be claimed, but not by her she knew, for this land was not hers.

‘Tween guards at the gates she walked, seeing in the stones the cairn
of her old life still lingering with a sense of pain and purpose
that never quite went away, even in the pain of her time
hanging from the shadowed tree that left her changed.
But those changes only let her know the past could be seen
and smelled, but need not rule her, not anymore.
And so she simply stepped deeper and deeper into the passage
until she came to the center and the gem at the heart of the matter.

So she stepped forward to take up the gem only to find
a presence before her waiting with the hunger of the wind
as it reached out a limb to grasp at her there.
She felt the pain of its hunger even as she drew back at last
but refused to surrender her heart from the task she swore
that she would accomplish under the shadowy sky.
And so she lifted her hands and lashed out against the lord
in his dark lair there where everything would linger and last.

But though she proved stronger than the shadow ever expected
she could not defeat him here in the heart of the matter
with his power so strong and his rage so unending.
But still hope remained and she took up the one dream that she had
and reached out past him and snatched up the gem,
and once it left the perch meant to hold it everything rent asunder
and the truth of the light came to bear for them all.