A departure from my usual kind of post. I was teaching figurative language in one of my classes last week and I had them do a creative assignment. They had to compose a poem with an obvious conceit and which contained a given set of tropes–metaphor, personification, simile, metonymy, etc. In the interest of fairness, I figured (ha!) I ought to try the exercise myself. So I came up with a situation: my lover has turned into a zombie; a conceit: the zombie woman is described in terms of a tree and tree-things; and a form: a blazon, which here happened to result in a sonnet. I had hoped that this might be the first poem of its kind, but there is a near precedent. Last year a guy named Chase Pielak published a book called The Collected Sonnets of William Shakespeare, Zombie (McFarland, 2018). In it, he tweaks Shakespeare’s sonnets so as to de-repress their latent zombie content, and provides a frame narrative (Shakespeare died [undied] a zombie) and critical apparatus. A great idea, inspired I’m sure by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but no less clever for that. But it has occurred to me that poetry remains the last frontier for zombie-themed writing. We have zombie novels, short stories, plays, and movies, but few, if any, zombie poetry collections or long poems. Obviously, lyric is a bit of a problem when the zombie is a zombie precisely for its lack of subjectivity, but that just leaves open more interesting kinds of poetry to employ. Anyway, it’s Halloween, and love is in the air. Here’s a zombie poem.

 

My Lady Doesn’t Look Herself Of Late

Her eyes are rotted cherries thumbed against a bole.
Her mouth but splinters stuffed into a hole.
Her cheeks are missing, bark fallen to the ground;
Her nose a knot, a welt, a borer beetle’s mound.

Mold upon her chin that spreads along her throat,
Wraps her twisted trunk in its fungus coat.
Once breasts now nests of foetid cankered sores
And blood like sap oozes from her pores.

Her arms are branches, handshake full of thorns.
She cannot sing or laugh, nor celebrate nor mourn,
Only shriek and hiss, grumble, moan and howl,
For death is grafted to her heart; her very roots are foul.

Oh love: don’t hide yourself behind that murdered tree;
Take my hand and kiss me deep and make me one with thee.