Religious – Page 2 – R.K. Lightfoot

Marked with an infallible token of death
Touched by a white horse, now looms my final breath
Rotted fingers and little black spots
An old adversary, come to draw my lot
No beak of rose, juniper and mint will mask the stench
As bodies fill up the fresh dug trench
Pestilence has come upon we peccant souls
Come with a purpose, to fulfil its role

– R.K. Lightfoot

‘White’ Is the first in a planned series of poems about the Four Horseman, with ‘White’ clearly dealing with Pestilence. I decided to have The Black Death as Pestilence’s disease of choice because of the devastating effect the disease had on 14th Century Europe and the imagery that I could draw from it.

Standing in a world where man has returned to dust,
Is this our reckoning for sins of wrath, greed and lust?
No flood for the wicked, no ark for the meek,
The cruel have flourished, no room for the weak.
Some still try to find comfort in grace,
Not even screams are heard as the hungry devour their face.
No morsels left, only thy neighbour.
Carving the meat proves to be hard labour.
Wandering the barren earth with no one listening to the pleas.
Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and sea.

– R.K. Lightfoot

‘To dust, you will return’ is set in a post-apocalyptic earth with a starving human population that has turned to cannibalism to survive. I employ a fair amount of religious imagery throughout the poem. The poem took me surprisingly little time to write after struggling to write anything for a while. And ‘To dust, you will return’ continues the dark and violent themes that seem to recur in all my poems.