It’s day 10 of Jane Dougherty’s A Month with Yeats poetry challenge and today’s quote is as follows: ‘And he saw how the reeds grew dark at the coming of the night tide’

Jane’s blog is: https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/2017/11/10/a-month-with-yeats-day-ten/

My poem today is called: THE MONSTER IN THE MAN

 

And was he not tied

and turned on the tide,

was there not light

and dark by his side,

though the morning’s sun

rose as his bride

it was the moon o’er his hand

at night that died.

And was he not washed

and worn on the waves,

was he not crushed

like the sea cuts the caves,

in the morning did he count up

the slaughter, the saves,

was he ashamed of how many

he’d laid in their graves.

And was he not just a reed

washed over sand,

was he not just a vessel

on the ocean unmanned,

controlled in the day;

all blood was banned

but unbound in the night

the beast took his hand.

And was he not just a man

who’d lost his sight?

Is there passion for the monster

lost in the night?

But the hunger he was bound

to before the light

was too much in the darkness

to put up a fight.

The best of a man,

a wolf of a beast

but never the two

could ever find peace,

Helios held the famine,

Selene supplied the feast

but not a single God

could offer a release.

A savage surrender

into the sea was swept,

the hair of the hound,

the soul that now wept,

a man and the monster

drowned in the depth

and in their beds, his children,

safely then slept.

And was he not tied

and turned on the tides

like the rise and fall

of a twist that divides

as the nature of man

and monster collides

but when the darkness descends,

the light it subsides.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly