PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Poets still publish their epic poems

for interplanetary audiences who forget them;

and graduate students who mine them for degrees;

and manuscript dealers who trade them for cash.

But asteroids like this---

with a cruel scene presevered by the cruel chill of space---

provided the greater, if sadly more anonymous

poetry.

Here is the obvious victim---

suspended by steel chains (shackled wrists and ankles)

by pikes driven into the natural arch of rock;

supposedly an elderly male;

most bones, included fingers and toes,

methodically broken.

In an interplanetary format,

the ransom notes, relentlessly repeated,

remain:  they are frighteningly specific,

and threaten a death more agonized---

should payment withhold or fail---

than most human bodies are meant to bear.

Hurray for correlation:

consulted data bases to not take that long

to locate the recipient of the deadly demands:

the matriarch of an old, a numerous

commercial family, upon whose mausoleum

only the title of widowhood acknolwedges

any sort of spouse, but unnamed.

The record of her enormous wealth---

enormous, tremendous, stupendous,

even by our luxurious lifestyles' standards today---

acknowledges nary a balancing error,

let alone a felonious, criminal threat.

Of her bearing, the words are:  stern and demanding;

of her business acumen:  uncompromised and demanding;

of her language:  severe and demanding.

Of her epitaph, one grandson (a poet, banished by her) wrote:

I tolerate the survival

of neither competitor nor rival.