To Dust Returne

Image via Creative Commons under Public Domain, illustration for John Milton’s “Paradise Lost“ by Gustave Doré

Content warning: mentions of sexual violence and death.

Prologue

A poem that deliberates on trauma, pain, and stagnation: ‘to dust returne’ is a desolate epitaph for the voiceless, haunted by a future destined to repeat itself. Drawing on images of Eden, violence and time are hopelessly interlaced, introducing a premature grief for those who are yet to suffer. The body becomes a stage on which ferocity is performed, and once enacted is immortalised, memorialised, ‘carved into stone’ - just as unmoving as the aftermath of eternity that refuses to change. As corpses are consumed by the earth, their legacies are consumed by those they leave behind, remembered in dark alleyways and cold courtrooms. This poem seeks to interrogate a culture of violation and the ways in which intimate partner abuse and fatality are perpetuated - whilst accounts are heralded as cautionary tales, instructions that wise women must learn. An endless ‘butchery’ of victims is akin to a powerless line of descendants, crucified for the sins of another.

to dust returne 

rewind to the birth. a plea. desecrate me,  

baby, sway me, serpentine satan,

taste sweet sinful hierarchy, a slow cyanide.

lover/executioner drives me out in desire

until my insides out on film exposures 

indite him, indict him, in verse, in pain

he holds the knife to my neck, ripe for the slaughter, 

a harvest that would make a village proud.

I rot at the end of his garden path, 

cradling successors that inherit their crucifixions

and the car keeps driving its hard 

mechanical hands all over our hateful bodies

time hitches like a broken vinyl. my unborn daughters 

bloom, becoming defiled roadkill, soft sacrificial lambs

the future embraces me erases me carves me into stone

watching the pillow of a girl’s cheek sit sliced like sunday roast

spreading the legs of brutality across state borders

the mother of original sin births eternal butchery  

their names melt on the tongue, in a slurry of hoary snow 

landfill of tomorrow’s corpses whispers to me, 

recites my violation, an invocation, in courtrooms and alleyways,

forgotten by Fathers permitting Man’s vicious revelry 

I reach forward with claws stained by blood-red soil 

into years I did not have the mercy of knowing, and clutch 

fruitless, at the fresh meat closed casket fate 

wired into the prefrontal cortex of Woman

a destiny as relentless as Time.

This poem was performed at Strand Magazine x King’s Poetry Society’s ‘Spooky Open Mic Night’ on the 25th October 2024.

Strand x King’s Poetry Society’s ‘Spooky Open Mic Night’, photography by Eleanor Hughes

---

Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson