אל תבטחו ... בבן אדם
Silently he sits waiting,
His fangs seem to glow in the night,
Their tips ablaze with something murky.
Suddenly seeing the serpent strikes.
The skin pierced, he begins to sink in,
Settling in for the fun to come.
The victim writhes, at first, panicking.
The viper clings tight, maintaining the flow of venom,
As the fits grow more and more frenzied.
Soon, a sort of calm seems to descend.
Despair already?
No, just the hope that perhaps stillness can still halt…
But what if? Perhaps, already…
As the victim wavers the viper savours the taste
Of sharply spiced uncertainty.
He shivers.
Then stops short.
To move is to surrender
But to lie there is to relinquish
Any semblance of control.
As the snake slithers off,
He can be heard firing his Parthian shot:
'Don’t worry, I meant well'.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/9x4beq/maybe_you_and_i/e9plfdk?utm_source=reddit-android
The title is a paraphrase of psalms 146:3 and translates to 'trust not in ... the son[s] of Man'. Part of a set of two poems written on one occasion a couple of years before the others I've posted so far.
Posted Nov 14, 2018, 11:38 PM UTC