Nevermore - A Poem

This is a poem inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Raven.”

From the raven’s perspective…

He renamed me.

Curious, I might think,

As if worn, grieving, or drunken with drink.

But, of this idea, I needn’t implore. Because the broken man renamed me,

And named me, “Nevermore.”

Why did I do it?

You ask me, why did I travel to his room and home,

For a flutter or flitter, my hauntings to roam?

I did it because he was grieving,

His life was a candle no longer lit,

And I came to end his bereaving.

Wrought of ghosts

And begging of me,

As if she were alive, for dare I speak,

And it is true, but she was a memory,

A blaze that burned, but now a reverie.

I was neither demon nor curse,

For I was simply his lover’s old friend,

Abandon again, for solely myself to fend

So when the window was then available ,

My heart and love so desperately terse,

His thrice-weakened soul was forever assailable.

It was then,

I say at that moment of magnitude,

For I knew, like me, living would never cease,

We would never again kiss the face of peace,

So my presence was an act of mercy towards the end.

For I came to ease him of such lassitude,

I came only, his sorrow, his living to suspend.

He abandoned me,

When his lady nay returned,

And his fire of love ceased to burn.

With him, with my feathers upon his skin, I tried

To comfort such a lost man and rueful, we cried

But, his grief evolved into a bitter rage,

He cast me off of the Roman god’s bust,

A victim of nature’s ever bloodlust,

He told me to leave and never again appear.

He threw at me gothic wines and bottles of sage,

And I fled through the glass with no other but fear.

Away, I stayed, for eons.

For so many long and lonesome days,

Traveling from rivers to oceans, from islands to cays,

Eternally with the thought that I was unloved,

My lady had slowly faded like the dawn,

And her lover had steeped in the lack, thereof.

To the deepest extent, I understand,

I was a reminder of her beautiful ghost,

I was a symbol of the Mortifier's boast.

Can I blame him for not loving me after her death?

Is it his fault there was no room left in his gut-wrenching breadth?

No.

No, it was not his fault,

But neither was it mine.

Neither was it mine that she indeed died,

But I took the brunt of his hateful grief,

And I was punished for his lack of belief.

Speculate all you want about my presence there,

But three decades had passed since our eyes had met,

Mine – torturous, this glowing red set.

A raven he thought that he could forget.

So he cried for her missing, sweet of folklore,

But my heart for him was naught so sore

As all I whispered and all I uttered was the hackled word of

“Nevermore.”

Elizabeth Mae Wolfram