“This Windy Morning,“ by Eric Robert Nolan

The gales cry,
their sounds rise,
so strangely like
the wailing of children.
The gales
have ripped a rift in purgatory.

Along the low hill’s haze
and indistinct palette of grays,
the thinning slate shapes
are either columns of rain,
or a quorum of waifish wraiths.

Condemned but inculpable
are those little figures —
long ago natives maybe — in an ironic,
insufficient sacrament:
this obscuring rain’s
parody of baptism.

If that faultless chorus
should never see heaven,
they will ever be wind without end
their lamentations ever
shrill within rare
arriving spring downpours.
Always will the squall
imprison their calls.

You and I should refrain
any temptation to breach
these palisades of rain —
lest we be greeted by each
iron-colored countenance:
the sorrowing slim nickel
of an infant’s visage,
little boys’ graying faces,
the silvering eyes of the girls.

© 2017 Eric Robert Nolan

[Note: I began writing this yesterday morning, which was, at a sensory level, just like the fictional morning described.  Southwest Virginia indeed has some unique weather, affected, as I’m told, by its sprawling mountain ranges.  (They circle the Roanoke metro area.)

The rain yesterday was abrupt and shrieking.  I posted on social media that I’d experienced “that eerie moment when the wind sounds strangely like the wailing of children.”  So hence the poem that I finished (?) tonight.  I think a lot of my friends will find it funny; they certainly were laughing at my poet’s melodrama yesterday.  One said it was a nice turn of phrase, too — and that it could be the start of a story.

I’ve never written what I’ve considered a “horror poem” before.  (“The Writer” in 2013 was never intended as such, anyway.)  But the genre is alive and well, at least in the small presses.  Horror poetry is frequently requested in the calls for submissions you can find on Facebook’s various “Open Calls” pages, anyway.  (And if you’re an indie writer, those pages are great to peruse anyway.)

I hope you enjoyed the piece.]

Photo credit: By Huhu Uet (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.