Drusilla poem.

[quinara]

Just bringing over a poem I wrote for the 'rear view mirror' prompt over at sb_fag_ends. It's a mashed-up free verse villanelle from Drusilla's perspective that I wrote quite quickly but am not too unhappy with. Suitable for everyone and lacking in any material that would induce a warning on AO3.

Autocar Eurydice.

When you first get out, you look back,
Glance up to the rear view glass
As you take the cassette and turn it in your hand.

That hell is far gone and we’ve been there too long,
But,
When you first get out, you look back.

The dry desert night tastes of petrol and ash,
I sleep and decay
As you take the cassette and turn it in your hand,
But you glance up and look
For queen-given clemency –
When you first get out, you look back.

No quiet, cold Eurydice
Will chase at your heels
As you take the cassette and turn it in your hand,
Dear Orpheus,
You send yourself back to hell.

When you first get out,
As you take the cassette and turn it in your hand,
You look back.

.

Comments

[stultiloquentia]

This is great! The punchline, Dear Orpheus / You send yourself back to hell, made me clap my hands. I feel like, if I had a brain capable of articulating anything gracefully this evening, I would be making all sorts of connections with Spike's later trips out of Sunnydale, especially the trip to find his soul -- which is basically the biggest don't look back EVER, isn't it?

And I love the line, I sleep and decay, which feels wonderfully referential, even if I'm blanking on any references.

[quinara]

Oh, cheers! Really glad you liked. Spike's is definitely a story of trying not to look back to Sunnydale and generally failing - to everyone's advantage but his own, I feel. :D

I'll confess that line was composed extremely prosaically by tossing ideas about sweet decay (to go with the petrol and ash) over and over, reworking it from the first draft of the poem, which was from Spike's POV (it refused to settle well there), ending up with my decision that there was too much about the surroundings and not enough physically locating Dru, such that 'sleep' was introduced as plain old description. But it did have a nice sense of All Death Ever, I thought; a bit like all those dead maidens in ballads who end up in clay and sods of earth.

[stultiloquentia]

I always seem to get my best lines by accident. The last-minute, "dammit I need something in that spot to make it scan" insertions get more praise than the gorgeous pentameters I spent hours wearing my brain down to a nub for. Go figgur.

it did have a nice sense of All Death Ever, I thought; a bit like all those dead maidens in ballads who end up in clay and sods of earth.

Right, exactly!