Third's a Charm

For the NaPoWriMo Challenge, three in a row for national poetry month at ReadWritePoem:

Third's a Charm ("Three in a Row")

The first one beat her. She was bad because he beat her.
And because a dragon, hatched from an egg of flame incubated
in her heart, deep in that pocket of inherited midnight,
struggled to press his scales out through her slimy skin.
Her breath was hot with dragon fire. The beatings
squeezed the dragon-flames into a crevice, transforming
it to dynamite or maybe a neutron bomb. A bit of antimatter,
heavy with shame and pain, prepared itself to blow acid and fire
in the face of the second when she finally escaped the first.
The second hit once, hard, then shrank
her with words and venom until she was smaller than the point
of a needle and crammed with the impossible mass of the universe.
The third one's a charm. If he can pry her out of her shells
of darkness and protective fat, and get past the land mines
and fire-breathing dragon, he might find a beating heart
held exposed in an open palm, eyes green
with forest light, a swallow, swooping through the trees,
carrying, like his cousin, an olive branch, a promise of roselight
and rainbows, kisses, a soft embrace, a hand to hold in his.


Mary Stebbins Taitt
for Pius, Nat, Keith and BP
090408-2124-2b, 090407-1651-1c

Of course, I didn't do their three in a row, because I was working on personal poetry, but I still hope to complete some or all of the NaPoWriMo challenges, even if not on the given day.