Using only words from Poe’s “The Raven”

I let my midnight dreams explore
what I had never dared before–

some fowl what I did see before
reclining quaint as once of yore.

I stopped stock still, and at the door
my soul then murmured “All ashore”

“Take this, take that, no songs outpour
forget your nightly Nevermore…

“Ah, bird! thou melancholy bore
here is my soul – and there, the door!”

————

Mary Cresswell is from Los Angeles and lives on New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast. She’s a science editor who switched to poetry and has been published in NZ, the US, the UK and Australia. Her fifth solo book, Body Politic, is being published in e-book and paper by The Cuba Press, Wellington, in July 2020. See also: https://www.read-nz.org/writer/cresswell-mary/