POETRY BY ED BLUNDELL

Ed Blundell worked as a teacher of English, a school inspector, and as Director of Education for the town of Stockport. He has been widely published in the US and UK and tries to write poetry that people can understand and enjoy.

He gave up searching for the meaning of life after discovering there wasn’t one.

GATHERING STORM

Evening. Somber amethyst moors
Stretch, horizon to wide-world end.
Western clouds regiment, black ranks
Foreshadowing rough storms ahead.
A dark wind whispers through heather,
A soft hiss of cautious warning.
This is the land the world forgot,
The endless yawn of splendid void,
Bathed in weak, watery, sinking sun,
Still calm before the coming blast.
Thin shelter here for scrawny sheep,
Some dry stone walls in half collapse.
More wind, a half-held breath, a gasp,
The first clouds shut the sunlight out.

THE LOST SOUL

A week ago in this churchyard
We laid her down to rest,
With flowers in her yellow hair
And a red rose at her breast.

A week ago we buried her
With many a bitter tear,
Closing her bonny eyes so blue,
And yet in her seventeenth year.

As earth fell on the coffin lid,
We heard the old priest say,
“Sleep with the Lord and rise again
Upon his judgment day.”

But sleep we know can never come,
Unless we help her rest,
With prayers and holy water
And a strong stake through her breast.

We scrape the earth from the coffin lid,
With a hasty muttered prayer,
And creak it back, then gasp to see,
Her body isn’t there.

I sit at night and weep for her,
Such wild thoughts in my head,
And wonder where she wanders,
Alone, unloved, undead.

DANSE MACABRE

Dead, they dance as if still living,
Wild, whirling, swirling, autumn leaves,
Twisting in a trance, demonic
Dervishes tumbling in the wind.
Stumbling blindly, rising, falling,
Under swaying, skeletal trees.
Banshee winds howl as they circle,
Kaleidoscopic rainbow rings,
Rattling, rustling, cracked, dry, broken,
Fragments of brighter distant days.
Shafts of watery, yellow sunlight
Shine weakly on them as they twirl
In their maenad, manic dancing
A frenzied, frantic carnival.
Formless yet they ghost together,
Shaping, shifting, solid then gone.
Withering wind, the devil’s breath.
The Danse Macabre, dance of death.