Black Night poem by Dyfed Lloyd Evans
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Black Night
Born of your troubled sleep, your darkest fears
Berobed in armoured garb of chaos torn
His mighty steel-plate mount, approaching, rears
Snorting gouts of flame, shaking barbéd horn
Where high upon his jewelled saddle throne
His gaze doth leave you empty, lost, forlorn.
He looks at you with deathly grin of bone
To say that this Dark Night is Thanatos
Who bears a scythe of finest, sharpest hone
To conjure images, despair and loss
For as he spurs his steed to run you down
Your deepest, darkest fears are hurl'd across
And in their sickly-sweet embrace you drown,
While charging night-mare steed still thunders on
As Death readies his scythe for the showdown
Preparing to expand his Dominion
While hourglass of your life ebbs fast away
The snorting steed pronouncing death foregone
And from his sharpened steel, no getaway
For as it scythes you utter feral scream
To wake and find that it was nought but dream.
Berobed in armoured garb of chaos torn
His mighty steel-plate mount, approaching, rears
Snorting gouts of flame, shaking barbéd horn
Where high upon his jewelled saddle throne
His gaze doth leave you empty, lost, forlorn.
He looks at you with deathly grin of bone
To say that this Dark Night is Thanatos
Who bears a scythe of finest, sharpest hone
To conjure images, despair and loss
For as he spurs his steed to run you down
Your deepest, darkest fears are hurl'd across
And in their sickly-sweet embrace you drown,
While charging night-mare steed still thunders on
As Death readies his scythe for the showdown
Preparing to expand his Dominion
While hourglass of your life ebbs fast away
The snorting steed pronouncing death foregone
And from his sharpened steel, no getaway
For as it scythes you utter feral scream
To wake and find that it was nought but dream.
This poem, though not one of my best, was born of a fascination with Shakespeare's sonnets. I wanted to generate a mythological sonnet that was grounded in Arthurian mythos. Though that mythos was pared-down to fit the confines of the poem. Thus the black knight becomes who he actually is: Thanatos the embodiment of death.
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