Secret Keepers

(Disclaimer: I am submitting this poem for Reena’s Exploration challenge: horror. The poem arose from a nightmare, and my be triggering for some readers.)

They always take the back roads,
virginal snow-covered lanes
lined with trees: pastoral views

Unmarked routes, out of sight,
use the innocence of landscape
to blot out their dark intentions

Pristine picture perfect scenes
lull the unsuspecting; breath-
taking vistas: secret keepers

The roads still exist in my dreams
the trees like soldiers, stiff and stark
stripped of their magical allure, now

guard the memories, painted red
with loss of purity; I had not
guessed the danger of woods

child mind incapable of conceiving
what wolves roamed in nature
the blood of their victims crimson

stains forever etched in silhouette
the shrillness of their screams
now silent echoes in the night.

(Secret Keepers first appeared here September of 2016. Art my own.)

Published by

VJ

Permission to write, paint, and imagine are the gifts I gave myself when chronic illness hit - a fair exchange: being for doing. Relevance is an attitude. Humour essential.

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