A creature born
within the comforting anonymity of darkness
Awakens in the harsh truth of daylight
It squirms
in the glare
afraid of the light
that pins it to the chair like a needle through its heart
Its heart beats faster
Panic starts to creep into its soul
Does it understand?
Or is it so blinded by the light
that it can think only of returning
to the velvet cloak of darkness?
No matter
Perhaps it is better that it doesn’t realize
how close death has come
But make no mistake, there is no escape
It has reached the end, and soon it will die
It bares its tiny fangs
hoping for a chance to strike
to sink its teeth deep into the flesh of its tormentor
But that chance will never come
And somewhere
beneath the gleam of hatred in those eyes
lurks the certain knowledge of its impending death
And it begins to know fear
This is part of your guilt. You did this to me
And you don’t even know who I am
I wasn’t part of your war
I was an innocent
I’m glad that you remember
Don’t you feel guilty?
Don’t you feel ashamed of what you did
Indiscriminate killing
No sense of morality
No thought given to the consequences of your actions
That’s what makes us different
The creature’s diseased mind
cannot understand its plight
Its imagination is too limited
to perceive the truth
It cannot be saved
The creature’s cries grow louder
but no one can hear them
It’s time
From the lines of Silaran in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 episode The Darkness and the Light. Lines with plot points in removed and punctuation stripped out. Submitted by Wesley Brown.
Verbatim Poetry 