The Paladin

The Paladin

I rose from my trial and testing vigil

now a knight, God’s holy knight.

His fire was a flame I held within

a tremulous but incandescent light.

I set out from my high stone

seat, now a threatened tower

answering my sovereign's call

to break the Old Ones' power.

For the land was soured with the

bile of evil, bled by a heresy, sharp

as my father’s Damascus blade,

that cut and left its soulless mark

upon their faces, or their limbs, that

scarlet scrawl of Satan’s passing wing

shadowed, then tatooed blue with sin. We

found and burned them in their faerie ring.

We burned them in the towns, with ease. Our

horses drove them to the village square;

flames kissed the magic in them black

as pitch, and let it out with a hissing flare.

Their smell, their cries, they pierced and split

the misty air, deep red-edged as any sword

but we stopped our ears with writ, while in the

crowd, grey monks intoned the Blessed Word.

We watched the Godfires burn ten days

and nights, bright hot and ever brighter still

till I wondered why I felt in me such pain

to see the luminous working of His will.

When all was colorless smolder, ashen silence

I knelt in humbled fear before the priest

who called God's glory down to cleanse my soul;

from all misplaced regret he gave release.

But later at the inn when she brought meat,

somehow it had a smell too wrong to eat.

October 2011

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poet's Pub

Mark Kerstetter is hosting today, and  has given us the fascinating prompt of entering into another persona, and writing a poem from another's point of view, from inside their skin, as it were. I don't know how successful I've been at completely escaping my own point of view here, but I have made a stab at it.