| At death's own wake | The dead will dance |
| In dying light | She shall in trance |
| Bewitch those near | All round about |
| The sky shall rend | With scream and shout |
| The bloody rain | Now flowing true |
| Exudes from clouds | When cleft in two |
| The rift is open | Dawn is red |
| The world is drowned | And all is dead |
An old poem of mine, I only recall it even now due to its personal magic for me. The poem can be read in two ways; either line by line, or as two columns - and the poem still makes sense either way. The remarkable thing about this, for me, is that the poem was not planned. It came to me 'out of the blue' and required no editing.
The inspiration for the first line, "At death's own wake / The dead will dance", comes from Chicago by Night (second edition), a White Wolf book. The exact quote there is "At Death's Own Wake ... / The Dead Can Dance". Possibly this is some reference to the band, Dead Can Dance? I'm not sure.
The phrase "dying light" makes me think of the 'deadlights' Stephen King refers to in It, but I've only ever seen the film (even though, funnily enough, I do own a copy of the book).
I feel that the uneven split of syllables on the penultimate line, "The rift is open / Dawn in red", changes the structure just that little bit, to emphasise that and the last line; "The world is drowned / And all is dead."
My thoughts on the title of the poem is that it is perhaps related to the Lament Configuration from Clive Barker's the Hellbound Heart, but maybe that's because I'm just a fool for Clive Barker's stuff.
Other than the two instances outlined above, I can't think of any other bits that I may have inadvertantly 'stolen'. The poem came to me as I was waiting to get the train one school morning. I was feeling fine, and nothing was wrong.
The phrase 'out of the blue' haunted me a bit, since the sky was somewhat lacking in clouds, and I'd just been part of a group that interviewed the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, for issue 14 of In Brief... He described his owm poems coming to him out of the blue. Funnily enough, it was the photo of Ben in the issue that went on to inspire myself and Michael Harwood to create Fishy, but that's another story altogether.