Featured Poem • September 2016
Morgan Le Fay at the Downtown Mall
Kavitha Rath
Night’s fall blankets the street, the bent moon stares with intense eyes at the earth and a view to control, but can she? She, who walks under bright lamps in fear of the dark, and thinks energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Stardust composes us, and to stardust we return, but she doesn’t have that luxury. The moon’s powder sifts down at the corner of her eyes. Magenta and orange dresses hang in a closed shop window, and the final vendors fold their tables to depart for the night. She enters a coffee shop to take an espresso to replenish her senses. Long ago, she ceased dreaming to give in to the thrill of nightmares. Mist runs through skeleton rails with discord; no rhyme to its movement, no feeling in its fingers. She imagines death as the end of life, but the beginning of dreams, the final moment, like riding down the dive of a roller coaster where heart seems to drop below before rising to mingle with clouds. The potion’s brewing in the cauldron, but she’s afraid to close her eyes. She’s strewn plans in velvet-bound books. In truth, she’d love to live in a castle or have tea with a stranger at the corner café and swirl around in a moon dance. Her memories are too stained, too tainted with time, It’s not the silence that disturbs, but the mist; once her companion, now an ordinary passerby. The silk edges of her damask dress brush against the cobblestone, and she slips and falls onto the pavement, back into stories that have left the pages.
Kavitha Rath lives in Washington, D.C., and enjoys writing myth-inspired poetry. Her work has appeared in publications including Danse Macabre, Papercuts, Through the Gate, and Strange Horizons. She can be found online at kavitharath.wordpress.com and on Twitter at @WrathofKavi.
About “Morgan Le Fay at the Downtown Mall,” she writes, “This poem holds a very special place in my heart, as I wrote it many years ago when I was very young and transitioning from one point in my life to another. At the time, I was quite engaged with Arthurian legends and particularly with the mystery, power, and enigma of Morgan Le Fay. I saw her as the character that bears witness to the stories and eternal myths, and how perhaps she has never really left our mortal realm after all, but not being able to die, moves in and out of the narratives that bind us all together.”
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