The death of a king.
He hangs here, fair,
bound, blue of skin and flowing hair,
with oken leaves to cover him.
Soon he will groan, a-crushing ‘twix two sacred stones,
and never a morsel for me, for me,
for after they will burn his bones.
The Precious Blood.
It costs, men say,
can stave off some god’s judgment day,
so valuable gods find him.
And others, too … a hundred valuable kings pass through,
but never a morsel for me, for me,
though I be Raven, black and true.
The Sacred Tale
may be told again,
when he’s long gone, of such great men
as Lancelot, God save him.
As Gawain, Percival, great lights, a sad score sacrificed by night,
(though never a morsel for me, for me),
and lastly, greatly, of the Christ.
The First of Kings,
ancienter than these,
was hung, in past age, on a tree,
with never a leaf to cover him.
And he did groan, and later All shall become his own —
but that’s to be. For now it’s me,
in grimmest vigil, all alone.
Out of Babel 
Jen, I’m not much of a poetry guy, although my wife gets zillions of poems. This one strikes me as awfully gruesome. BTW, it think it’s ‘oaken’, not ‘oken’.
T
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Really? A raven lamenting that he won’t get to eat the human sacrifice is gruesome? Nah …
I wrote this around the time I had taken a class on Arthurian Literature. Many of the stories in the Arthurian cycle have a “death of a king” kind of theme, sometimes showing what appears to be pre-Christian roots. Like, some of the Grail stories involve a kingdom that is withering because the king has received an incurable wound, and someone must come along and, say, fill a basin with blood in order to cure him … very odd, but intriguing, stuff. This poem suggests they are prefigurings of the Christian story.
Anyway, I spelled it “oken” on purpose to give it that old-timey feel. Spelling in medieval times was much more … variable … than today.
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