A late-night mumble following a full day of teaching and coding.

This rhyme came as something of a surprise. My brain’s not in it. I’m still thinking about sound synthesis in scripting languages and how to discover my dynamically-assigned IP address without appealing to either system calls or web sources. But the chant seems to be rolling along well enough in quite a different direction….

Untitled Poem

The glasses fall from the Hills of Fire
  And deep and dark they stain
All the castle moat, where they stick in mire
  That accrued from the noontime rain.
Yon, high in the flaming, towering Hills
  Their owners in agony seek
In their blinding rage through their combs and pills
  For the glasses that never leak.

The glasses held ink that could stain a world;
The blood of a dragon, æons old and curdled;
A drop of a tear from the goddess of love
Which some hero had won in the clouds above;
And one held, most precious, a short copper wire,
The lock-pick that opened the Hills of Fire.
But now in the moat out of sight did they lay,
Lost in the rubbish that’s dumped there each day.

In the Hills of Fire there’s a deathly still
  As the truth dons on their souls:
The glasses, they find, were last seen on the sill
  Near the daily rubbish bowls.
They had lept from that perch when the trash was tossed
  To doubt that there was not room;
They despaired, for they know that the lockpick lost
  Meant their tower was now their doom.

The glasses held treasures that no one could buy:
The patch that had covered king Odin’s eye;
God’s breath, which had breathed into Adam life;
The laugh of a child, which had ended strife;
There was one labeled “‍notions‍”, contents unknown,
But each passing year its value had grown;
And one held, most precious, a short copper wire,
That would never again pick the lock of Fire.