The Poison
written by: Jay Bond
I. Prelude
Her husband had always insisted
that she must never cut her hair
or so she said, with an indulgent smile, or plea.
You could sense the interdiction, with or without words
the hair combed, painstakingly, rippling to the hips
making us want to look away.
From within this shimmering swathe the woman
moved. The cat started and stared.
The gleaming veil spoke loud its revelations.
With a sullen shimmy, the glimmer was dispersed
at the cluster of us, in a sudden flare, there in our own house.
The silver teapot leans, looping a brash rainbow.
Her cheeks bloom nature’s carmine, eyes of Cornish blue.
We all turned a little aside, edged in synch
from the chill of the glimmer of the plague.
Only the boy didn’t pay attention, or much.
A moth batters against the window screen, dispersing a dull dust.
The night is close as frangipani. The storm longs.
II. The House in Deep Night
A poem is heard from The Golden Treasury of Poetry.
Eyes close with the cover: “And that was the end of that.”
A rustle of fever, wheezing breath or scraping cough
extend the night in gentle orchestra.
A sickly child knows well their mate the moon
how she attunes with breath in quiet sanctuary
keeping watch in half-sleep’s miasma.
Amid the gossips of the wall dwellers, paper-thin
whistling and crepitating, gliding about their nightly business
a second family keeps the night watch, soothing
with tandem lives, echoing ours like rumours
a murmuring inner chorus, the words hard to catch
fading at dawn as breath strengthens, temperature stills.
III. Feathers, fur, craw
Feathers, fur, craw, in loose-weaved basket of weeds:
the plump man in harlequin jacket
glides a thumb over the creature’s ear.
A bell jingles.
Dumbly Harlequin stands.
The woman opposite, hair parted to hips
imparts a slow ‘moue’.
Her morsel mouth wavers before hand conveys
a little bundle of mince
from her fur-rimmed plate by fork.
She wipes her mouth solicitously
leaving a moue of pomegranate stain on the rippled white linen.
She moves on. Moving on is not leaving.
- The Poison - March 8, 2026
