Hyperboreá#
The snow descends upon a place
sequestered on a crown,
a hidden place the heights embrace
to shield from view a town.
This muted morning taking shape
as silence softly falls,
conceals beneath its winter cape
a place no one recalls.
A lantern flickers through the storm,
a single maid who dares
the cold with cloaks to keep her warm
while whispering her prayers.
She trudges over covered tracks
and braves the icy route,
her prayers return as winter sacks
this town of no repute.
Their isolation near complete,
for ages left alone,
as empires spread below by fleet
then toppled overthrown.
-
The world, in time, forgot to look,
erased its name from maps,
concerns once kept were overtook
by nation states’ collapse.
-
A bastion left of humankind,
yet unbeknownst to them
on kingly crags this town enshrined
the final diadem.
-
Tectonic waves had carved a bay
from angled rock to hold
the overlapping crests that spray
their noises uncontrolled.
This madness long had ruled their lands,
each sound behaved so strange,
each echo roamed in raving bands
across the mountain range.
At first, the words reheard deferred
the dialogues of friends
but everywhere the curse recurred
where open air attends.
Their padded walls were thickly made
to soothe their families’ dread,
yet even still, the bell’s cascade
at noon invades their head.
With quarries mined and stripped of ores,
the walls arose in rows
but always shaking troubled floors,
as echoes split in flows.
A kingdom grew by days deranged,
remade above the sky,
as generations left them changed
and hard to classify.
Their deeds were drawn in metric feet,
to cease the wagging tongues.
Each beat was marked on ledger sheet,
the real estate of lungs.
A sentence measured out was taxed
at rates none could afford,
except the noble lords relaxed
in riches they had stored.
Despite these lengths, their words returned
and drove them more insane;
a tyrant promised ease unearned
and seized the throne to reign.
His grace then placed a clause in laws
to cause a pause to rhymes,
for rhymes were crimes within the claws
of lawful paradigms.
Decrees came down for reasons why
they organized police,
and motions passed to codify
that rhymes disturb the peace.
The poets’ screams for days decayed
inside the dungeon walls,
then days again when wind replayed
their cries reborn in squalls.
Now torches light a crowd of men
parading down the street.
With shackles locked, a citizen
is led by hands and feet.
Behind the mob, the sobbing maid
laments the morning crowned,
when evening come, his body laid,
she’ll weep upon his mound.
-
Original: Feburary 2025
Revision I: September 2025
Revision II: February 2026