Beasts of Life and Death

Perhaps one creature, pale of feature,
Thin and wan, claimed as Death's pawn,
Perhaps this being, inner seeing,
Might understand the night-beast's plan.

Once, through fate or chance, in full moon's lance,
Beast and dead met head to head;
One thirsting life through endless strife,
The other living for Light's giving.

The pallid man stood in blood-soaked sand.
At his feet lay a corpse bleached white,
When the Unicorn lit at the edge of the pit,
Drawn by reflection of life's light.

As the night-beast advanced, the man stood entranced.
Startled, he stepped into shadow.
The beast sniffed the blood, placed a hoof in the flood
And glared at the man of face sallow.

Moments sped on, bits of life done and gone,
But the pain neither moved nor stirred,
Till the man wandered close and the night-beast's wings rose;
And the Unicorn's great wings whirred.

"Stay, slow, my friend," the man said in the end.
"I sense you know what has occurred.
"You may even know what has hurled me so low...
"How this fate I might have averred."

The beast's pinioned form calmed, but the storm
In its breast raged at the man's nearness;
Sensed his true nature: evil in the creature,
But stayed, fascinated by queerness.

The man caressed the jet black mane's tress,
Made coaxing sounds in the beast's ear,
Then resumed his speech, as if to beseech.
The Unicorn know the depth of his fear.

"Can you fathom how one fear the phantom
Of one's own mortality gone?
Or could your mind understand how time
Compounds the sum of things wrong?"

The night-beast then lifted its wings as dawn sifted
Its first slanting rays high above.
As the man turned to go, the beast heard a cock crow
And the pallid one gestured farewell.
But the beast took to wing, had forgotten the thing
That brought it to the vampire's dell.

Its one major goal was to make itself whole,
And for then there was no time enough.
So it fled the damned placed and rose up into space
To caress the cloudy dream stuff
It knew as its home: the place all its own
Where only the Light might invade...
There to rest for the day, die its transient way
And ponder new plans to be made.

Author's Note: I have written a series of poems around the Arabic image of the unicorn: winged and black. It represents the baser instincts in man in a way that is not conveyed by the more western unicorn. Although westerners allow that the nature of the beast can only be tamed by the innocence of a virgin, they do not address the why of that assertion. I have tried to capture that reason in these poems.

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