Haunted

Pebbles left outside my door. Twigs crossed on tracks.
Dead birds. Skeletons of fish.
Silent curses shriek in ragged tatters
As wind howls around the house.

I did not mean to kill him. It was not at all my fault.
Why then does he haunt me in such relentless fashion?
In solitary misery I walk the dog along the beach.
Sand squeaks beside me: no one there.

Yet as I step along a muddied shore I see
My footprints are not alone.
The marks left from my own two feet are sunk below a heavier tread.
I try to run.

Here are the adjudicator’s comments:

HAUNTED SUCCESS FOR MPIRA IN PITS & CRYPTS
As is becoming usual, we had another huge entry for our monthly Arena competition with over 60 entries posted to the site. Plenty of hair curling entries, but the eventual winner was the subtle spinetingler, Haunted by mpira.

Adjudicator's Report - Magdalena Ball

Certainly these are haunting poems. Set in their chilling, death ridden, crypts and underworld, they cast a cold fear through the reader in a way that is appropriate for a “Pits & Crypts” contest.

Many of the poems here do take their cue from Poe’s work, and that’s fine: Poe is a wonderful source of inspiration. But Poe was also a strong critic of the cliché and the obvious, famously stating that that meaning in literature should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface.

Works with obvious meanings, he wrote, cease to be art. So too, do works where rhyme, even clever rhyme, becomes an end in itself, overwhelming the meaning of the work. The rhyme and rhythm needs to support and drive the overall purpose of the poem and not the other way around.

Many of the poems were too overt, with the horror explicit, or where both meaning and originality were sacrificed in order to get the rhyme. Instead of focusing on the singsong line ending, the poetry would have done better to focus on strong imagery, original metaphor, and the intensity of the emotion and the meaningful twist of the denouement.

Where subtlety, horror, and skill combined however, the poems became universal, tapping into the deepest fears of the human psyche and creating a breath-holding moment. Unfortunately that was rare, which isn’t surprising, as creating good horror in verse is no easy task.

One poem that succeeded wonderfully in doing this was mpira’s “Haunted”, which featured an internal haunting: the pain of a guilty conscience. Imagery here was strong, as the reader follows footsteps along the beach past dead birds and fish skeletons. The shock of an unrhymed and inexplicit ending works well, and allows the reader the freedom of imagining a conclusion far scarier than any spelled out one could be.