To Grendel
David Stephenson

How are things out on the fen?
Conditions here in town have been
largely unchanged these thousand years.
We’re still as racked by phantom fears
as when you fire-eyed sons of Cain
were thought to murder Saxon thanes.

Our current monsters come from space,
a skinny, toothless, bug-eyed race
who kidnap people in the night
through an enchanted flash of light
to use in grim experiments
for some unspeakable intent.

What doesn’t change must be innate.
It is our melancholy fate,
or, rather, our inherent trait
to fashion from ancestral fright
demons crouching in the night
outside the camp, beyond the light.

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David’s notes: “This is a poem from the 90s, when The X-files was big on TV and there were a lot of people claiming to have been kidnapped by aliens. I used to be amused by irrational beliefs in things like Bigfoot and UFO sightings, but given the recent ascendance of ignorance in the U.S. I find them much less charming. I must have been reading Beowulf when I was writing it, because I connected the fear of aliens to the bugbears of old.

“This poem first appeared in 1999 in an exceedingly obscure print journal called Riverrun, which was published at Glen Oaks Community College in Centerville, MI. Internet searches turn up no results for this publication, so it’s not just defunct, but erased from memory. This poem was also in my first collection, Rhythm and Blues.“

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David Stephenson is a recovering manufacturing engineer from Detroit, and the editor of Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. His latest collection is Secret Dance.

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To Grendel David Stephenson

To Grendel
David Stephenson