The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
Moon Orchid
by Sheikha A.
It was my claws that first unfurled— rasp singing of an abraded soul— uncommon in the meadow. Fog had eaten everything; pine, moon and every whisper of reflections— whispers— for this is what remained between drifting dawn and dusk. I was both product and outcome; input of hybrid cradling; whisper of utopia; the myriad ambitions budding inside adventurous naivety. Germinated against will, the liquid substances forced my roots, and gradually, with each ending equinox, under persistent permeation— against my will— I could no longer control the spilling; all the whispers inside me forging a new being of its own
melting flower
the frost no more
tugging me under
Spring arrived like an eruption. In full bloom, the hours had begun to strangely thicken. Sky seemed to have embodied water, always hung in a state of precipice; it was as if time had become stuck between seasons. Past clung to present with only just a whisper making it to the future. Much has changed now with not much having chanced. I am eternal bloom— the moon maiden— removed from light; my reproduction burnt. This meadow is only night. All of each bloom that once graced, now just whispers in water— salty, decomposed and immortal. Fog rolls in without truancy; nights black with a new breed of molten starlight; tonight I go uneaten yet again. My petals of claws creak like old bones. Until the next wave in this eternity of blooming, the sky shifts only just. Something is different about the whisper this round; my stem-body receives a shimmer of hope. I can hear the singing within: hoarse hymn of the one left behind, but soon I shall be taken; the fog has dealt a promise to my being, holding sway
crowing stars —
a dagger of light
neck to torso
Fiction © Copyright Sheikha A.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.
More from author Sheikha A.:
Nyctophiliac Confessions:
Poems by Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee
“The night is cold enough to inspire poetry,” says Sheikha A. in her poem, “Reading My Bones.” This is the basis of Nyctophiliac Confessions – poems that are introspective and luminal, poems that require a certain amount of silence and space to be fully formed and appreciated. Reading these poems, I imagined that they were the kind of poems that assert themselves unbidden during a bout of insomnia. (A nyctophiliac being someone who loves the night or loves darkness).
Nyctophiliac Confessions is the 17th installment of Praxis’ chapbook series and contains twenty-six poems written by two poets, Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee, interspersed with abstract paintings by Robert Rhodes.
Spreading the Writer's Word 