Morgul Vale



 

"Wide flats lay on either bank, shadowy meads filled with pale white flowers. Luminous these were too, beautiful and yet horrible of shape, like the demented forms of an uneasy dream; and they gave forth a faint sickening charnel-smell; an odour of rottenness filled the air." - The Two Towers

 

      Pale and beautiful, soft and fair;
      A hideous reflection from a darkened mirror.
      The beautiful flowers of the Morgul Vale
      Breathe the poisonous reek and
      Partake of the adulterated soil.
      They trail their leaves and petals,
      Waving like corpse fingers,
      The water flows past them deadly cold.
      Steaming with vaporous ill-will,
      Pulled up into their thirsting roots,
      Death courses through their veins.

      Thus for lack of any clean thing,
      To slake their thirst and fill their need
      Will the innocent deeply partake of evil.
      Thus an honest need wrongly filled
      Warps and twists to dark purpose.
      Pale as sweet milk, yet rotted inside;
      Luminous as the rising moonlight,
      As the drying gleam of eyes newly dead.
      What nightmare is this
      That they yet live and grow.

      Ah, the heart cries -
      It would have been a mercy
      To grant them a swifter death.
      It would have been a mercy
      To grant them death at all.
      Slow poisoning and perpetuation of evil:
      If such perverted innocence could but perish
      As a blossom picked, and wither
      Rather than living on to become a mockery
      Of their original beauty - mercy indeed.

      Like a cancer, they grow and bloom.
      The deadly flowering of the Morgul Vale.

 


A. Buckles / '03


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