La Chanson de Malfleur/Flower of Evil

An errant leaf, precociously red,
tumbles down a deserted street
unnoticed by anyone,
save by a lonely woman
tending her garden
at an ungodly hour.

Tumbling indigo curls
brush her tumescent belly;
the life within
stirring to the night's song
and the contralto hum
of a strange lullaby.

"She is not of these parts,"
folks murmur.
“Oh! But, she sure keeps a fetching garden,"
escapes an exclamation.
The town is tense,
as its youth go missing, day by day.

She smiles
at her secret baby,
at the secret of her garden,
at the crunch of the marrow-brown earth
under her naked feet,
at the muffled pleas from the cellar.

A ripe, harvest moon
midwifes the birth of a brown-eyed girl
cleansed in her mother's deathblood.
The neighbors find the stray baby
in the fall-kissed garden
among the bones of her missing fathers.

The child carries the once-beauty
of the forgotten garden;
her dappled skin,
the map of a far-away land.
A kind heart takes her, in pity;
a mass grave obliterates her mother's sins.

Bloodthirst never parches the girl's throat
for she is both the Archangel,
generous and selfless to a fault,
and the sulpher-tongued Serpent,
at whose cagedoor
she paces unaware, once...upon...a time.