At the Assassin’s Hands

Issue ThreePoetry

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By Melinda Jane
Your sea soft, melancholy blue eyes

Your long, slender Celtic hands

Your long, curled locked hair

 

You, at 19 years

You, in 1875

You, Mary Julia Buchan

 

You would at your glimpse of perfection

Womanly perfection

‘Snuffed Out’

Your candle smothered of air

Your inner glow ebbing and extinguished

At the hands –

“At the hands of an Assassin!”

 

He who followed you like – ‘Prey’

He who desires to take

He who wants

He who sees your curls and

Wants to possess a lock of it

 

He who took, your life’s earthly vessel

He who hung on a rope

‘For You’

Coils of rope curled around his neck

And ‘HUNG!’

 

Mount Gambier Gaol

Your Murderer!

William Page

 

On a cold, winter’s day

Thirty-four days of waiting

Your tortured SOUL

Now at rest

Your monument still there

The words

I saw

I read

Stamped on your requiem tomb –

 

‘Our days are as the grass

or like the morning flower

if one sharp blast sweep o’er

the field it withers in an hour’

 

O your ode in death’s sleep

I have not forgotten you

I do weep

I do verse

I do know, your tragedy of not choosing

Your own death’s path of old age

With your children

Your seed at your funeral graveside weeping

To flower your coffin’s chest

 

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