Featured Poem II • April 2018
Libitina’s Garden
Kyla Ward
I. The Grove No temple stands within the walls of Rome to she who is Dis Pater’s palatine. The cypress branch outside the shuttered home denotes a grove beyond the Esquiline where ash sequesters souvenirs of dread— the greater bones may well resist the flame— and all the earth is rancid with such dead as left the future neither wealth nor name. Her votaries both winged and fanged compete with witches for the choicest scavenging. The foulest odours mingle with the sweet of spices flung in hasty offering. No image of her overlooks this place, yet all who die will recognise her face. II. Vespillonis Divine Fortuna wars with ancient Nox. By day, the portal Esquiline is barred to all that might be judged unorthodox, but darkness strips great Rome of its facade, erasing privilege in the cobbled street, as those whose sandals leave a smear of ash rouse terror by the shuffle of their feet surpassing both the prison and the lash. For every corpse, regardless of its name departs the city under Nox’s eyes. The stretcher bearers handle all the same, though mime and flambeaux offer a disguise. But let her blink: a star comes tumbling down. Dread Libitina stalks towards the crown. III. The Dream of Augustus Still mortal, the new Emperor awakes within his silken sanctum, sure of threat. The watch lamp gleams, no shout the silence breaks, but through the drapes he spies a silhouette bespeaking woman with averted face, a stubbled scalp and shoulder curving bare.
Kyla Lee Ward is a writer, actor and artist who lives in Sydney, Australia, with her partner and two cats. The Land of Bad Dreams is her collection of dark and fantastic poetry, which is also to be found in such venues as Weirdbook, Eternal Haunted Summer, Spectral Realms and Midnight Echo . Her novel Prismatic (coauthored as Edwina Grey) won an Aurealis Award for Best Horror. Her short fiction has appeared in Ticonderoga Online, Shadowed Realms, Gothic.net and in the anthologies Gods, Memes and Monsters: A 21st Century Bestiary and Hear Me Roar, among others. Her short film “Bad Reception” screened at the Third International Vampire Film Festival, and she was a member of the Theatre of Blood repertory company, which also produced her work. She enjoys lunar eclipses, cemetery crawls and medieval combat sport, along with formal verse. To see some very strange things, try http://www.kylaward.com.
About “Libitina’s Garden,” she writes, “I was researching Roman funerary practices for an entirely different project and came across this crucial and cryptic figure. Libitina is sometimes termed the goddess of corpses and appears to have been the local psychopomp, but all we know of her is derived from passing references in Horace, Festus and Juvenal, a longer entry in Plutarch and the miraculously surviving regulations for the conduct of undertakers (‘Libitinarii’) in the city of Puteoli. There is no known painting or statue. That one of the first decrees of the Emperor Augustus was for the improvement of the city cemetery is fact, the rest is just a whisper in the darkness.”
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