I found a fallen path into a world so new
The people lay all dried, embalmed, impaired sinew
Amid the stoney square, their moonlit skin aloof
A tree all withered hard, upon a strange fruit grew
There hung upon its bough a beauty ripe with doom
A twilit goddess swayed, a silken thread so drew
Below, a stone was etched upon their frozen gaze—
“LO FILL THY CUP WITH BLOOD BEFORE THY CHALICE RAISE”
On earth beneath her feet a lucent liquid lay,
A silent ageless pool, and altar shadows rayed.
And from that hallowed stone the golden cup had strayed
Upon the mournful ground, as darkness stole this place.
I looked upon this vessel’s grace, o’er come with tears
And trembling kneeled beside to take in solemn fears
Then drew my wretched form before that holy seer
Lo, blood so filled the cup it flowed with passing years
And sun and moon then ceased to roam in heaven’s sphere
And ‘pon my vision’s world a shining path appeared.
©2026 R.A.R. Knight
Author’s Note:
A poem written in loose iambic hexameter (also known as Alexandrine meter). The imagery is of dissipation, death, ritual cost, and contraction into a secondary world. The speaker does not remain a passive observer or fall into ironic detachment. He actively engages the scene in a lived act of sacrificial openness; an openness to the unexpected (the blood ritual, the hanging goddess, the inscription) that reconfigures desolation into a shining path.
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