PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

What force of sorrow got me down, those flights of crumbled steps

The air of the night flowing over me with every heavy step

The dust rising from each foot fall choked me and the pitch black made it hard to see

Several times I nearly fell, but the dewed wall saved my falling

The stairway of the crypt was blacker sure than Dante's hell

And several times behind me I heard the church's solemn bell

Instead of haunting me it encouraged me, that constant tolling knell

So down, down, more down I treaded with the music of the dying bell

Finally the stairs ended, now on cracked stone I stood

Moonlight gave a ghostly gleaming, through broken boards of rotted wood

Some old well perhaps, unused in aging, but the moonlight used it well

The ancient oculus up above helped my seeing, a horror that's hard to tell

Since I'd entered this cavern my eyes had been riveted to the hole from whence wandered the moon

And then I followed the gleam from whence terror had streamed

To the floor of that awful, foul room

Oh! The bodies innumerable piled high like a pyramid lay under the light of the moon

And the sight made me gasp, and I nearly foundered aghast

At the sight illumined by the moon

The corpses nearest the floor were skeletal, all bones and rotting clothes

The next tier were as pitiable with black flesh rotted to bone

Higher still the sickening sight, of the dead half rotted half bone

And fresher still were those atop them, who from the old well undoubtedly been thrown

So the ghastly mystery solved, the old cemeterys doom brought to light

I turned myself round and the stairway alight

But I remembered my intention, forgotten in my fear

The reason I snuck into this hellish crypt here

To see my late daughter, who yesterday was buried here

But I turned me around once more with sorrow and a tear

I let my eyes wander that rotting pyramid, from the bottom to its top

And at its summit my heavy heart stopped

My knees buckled underneath me, and prostrate I fell

For there lay my Kyrie, under the moonlight and the bell.