The Winter Throne

I found this yesterday - hilariously enough, it's a poem I wrote when I was around fifteen, and playing about with Tolkein-style mythological imagery and new rhyme-scemes. I think I was aiming for a personification of winter. I don't think I quite managed it. Also, note the fifteen-year-old angst and complete failure to maintain the rhyme-scheme in the last verse. But, you know... I was fifteen, and we need twenty three posts.

The Winter Throne

He came again this morning; full
Of bellicose belligerence;
His cloak was choked with ice and wool
From creatures beyond recompense.
He thundered through, with his Host;
A seething, breathing, heaving mass
Of diademed demonic class
That each sought to destroy the most.
They broke off branches and froze the grass
And left us with our ghosts.

They came again this morning; out
Of frozen hideouts further North;
Where creatures thick with scaly clout
Hunt and feed as men come forth.
The night is all eternal there
In older, bolder, colder lands
Where Shadows flee the sun’s soft hands
To breed the ice that fills their lairs.
They tear down trees, turn earth to sand
And horde their ill-gained wares.

He came again this morning; aimed
For the Mountain Citadel
To renew his Yule-tide game
Of recreating Earthly Hell.
He saw the walls and tore them down
In rumbling, crumbling, tumbling stone.
He entered purposely alone;
He came to reclaim his crown
And gain again the Winter Throne
To draw the Summer’s frown.

He killed again this morning; all
The townsfolk’s children gone away.
We screamed and swore to take the walls
Of the Citadel come day.
The gates we burned in fire and flame;
A whirling, swirling, twirling pyre
That swarmed and warmed the Winter Sire
Until, screaming, out he came.
We stoked the blaze and urged it higher;
And grieved his very name.

He died again this morning, in
Ice and fire, rage and hate;
We scattered him to all four winds
And drove his Host back from the gates.
There we stood, together, alone
In grieving, disbelieving pain
As the snowfalls turned to rain
And promised Summer would atone.
We cried; awaiting his regaining
Of the Winter Throne.


Also: I totally managed to get a line of cynghanedd in there. Points to whomever sees it first.