literature

Appetite Comes with the Eating

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Literature Text

1. The real horror of October
is the winter, the rising darkness.

It's said they caught him weeping,
heard him babbling about the steam in the snow,
the brown mass that had been a person—
his little girl, dead from the cold.

He ate his wife and daughters.
And when the villagers came for him,
he let them take him—to the tree
in the center of the square, where he hung,
discolored with frostbite and gangrene.

They called him Wendigo,
gave him to the spirit of the Dying Season,
and hoped that he would rest.

2. My ancestors had a word for his kind—
Strigoi.
They would have cut out his heart
to stop him from feeding.

He walked again.
Ate his fill of the town that killed him
and marched south, slept every spring
to wait for the Season of the Dying
to come again.

3. I saw the flesh-eater once, in my youth
in a Massachusetts town
near Boston, out on a frozen pond.

I saw his face beneath the ice,
saw his teeth bent with bone-crunching,
before he disappeared into the black water,
perhaps to snack on sleeping fish.

Since then I have feared the grasping hands
and hungry mouths of lake bottoms,
feared the darkness for what it is:
the appearance of peace.
Some parts of this story are true, and some aren’t,
and like a good storyteller I won’t tell you which is which.

:)

Another triptych! This is a second poem for the Poetry Screams Contest! For this one I used the prompt "the Dying Season."

All comments are most welcome! Please, PLEASE critique!

OOPS! I should add:
Wendigo:"The wendigo (also known as windigo, weendigo, windago, waindigo, windiga, witiko, wihtikow, and numerous other variants) is a creature appearing in the legends of the Algonquian people.

It is thought of variously as a malevolent cannibalistic spirit that could possess humans or a monster that humans could physically transform into. Those who indulged in cannibalism were at particular risk, and the legend appears to have reinforced this practice as a taboo.

Wendigo psychosis is the name conventionally given to a culture-bound disorder featuring an intense craving for human flesh and the fear that the sufferer would turn into a cannibal. This once occurred among Algonquian native cultures but has declined due to the Native American urbanization."

Strigoi:"In Romanian mythology, strigoi (English: poltergeist) are the troubled souls of the dead rising from the grave. Some strigoi can be living people with certain magical properties. Some of the properties of the strigoi include: the ability to transform into an animal, invisibility, and the propensity to drain the vitality of victims via blood loss. Strigoi are also known as immortal vampires."

Yay, Wikipedia! :)

Now I totally need to go draw a picture of a Wendigo and a child meeting...
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