Anguish and Repentance

Trapped in a little corner of my room,

I sat, shrouded in gloom,

My face wrapped up in my shawl,

That grew wet as tears down my face did crawl.

 

My heart lay buried deep in sorrow,

Beating slowly as hours led to the morrow,

When my son shall face the gallows,

My days were to become hollow.

 

A candle was all I had tonight,

A candle was all I had in my life,

A candle soon to melt and die,

Its flame my sole ally.

 

And the flame flickered and danced,

As the slight breeze rustled and harried

My lonely rendezvous with the candle,

They say my son’s a vandal.

 

With bleary eyes, I gazed

Into the hours about to come,

When the rope shall brace my son,

The rope that every man did fear and shun.

 

The church bell gonged its boding,

The hour of my execution is nearing,

When my soul shall cease to live,

While my body will remain, an empty shell.

 

It shall be the last walk

To the murky lane of death,

Whose stones shall echo his sins,

I pray, let tomorrow it rain

 

So I can be one with my child,

Dissolve in the rain and flow

In my son’s blood, never to return home,

Oh, I do not wish to return home!

 

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2

Reminiscing the smell of tea leaves,

As I ran past the fields,

My childhood spent climbing tress,

My adulthood in murky deals.

 

Slumped in a corner of my cell,

I subsided into the quagmire of my thoughts,

Hauling me into an obscurity,

An obscurity obscure if my life’s obscurity.

 

In the marshes of lust and desire,

I dwelled, and forbidden riches I acquired,

Only to be swallowed by it,

Never again to spot daylight.

 

The hands that bore me in youth,

The hands that stroked me in sleep,

The hands soft never uncouth,

Now I did long for comfort as I did weep.

 

As the hour drew nearer,

I said my prayers

To the God I still believed in,

And the woman who always believed me.

 

‘Tis the price of my sins,

My fate now sealed and delivered,

To the rope and black veil of death,

While my body to the ravens to be fed.

 

She’ll be there, among the crowd,

Watching, fading helplessly,

I wish I could embrace her a last time,

And bury my soul in her’s, my heart in her’s.

 

Two strokes later, I shall walk out to the jeers,

To the last sunrise of my existence,

And breath my last, never to return home,

Oh, I wish to return home!