A Woman Cast in Stone

She sits all alone in a palace of stone
on a planet that circles a dying red sun.
 
Unlike her sad sisters who soon became crones,
whose bodies are dust and a shovel of bones,
 
she fashions her youth from a series of clones
who feed in the darkness until they are done.
 
Her suitors are fiends who seek only to own
--not her life, not her mind, not her soul--
 
but the secret she holds in a bastion of stone
that keeps age at bay while the centuries run.
 
Friends are long dead, her name is unknown,
her world is a barren one all sane men shun.
 
Her beauty's a sin that she cannot atone,
her days are far empty, her passions undone.
 
She sits all alone in a palace of stone
like an unchanging sculpture of obsidian.
 
Chill to the bone, she feels the sky moan,
as she waits for the death of the sun.


Comments

Miles T. Ranter's picture
You are right, Bruce. It's not a monorhyme. I see that now. Although "stone/sun" could be considered a slant rhyme, and most of the words (except for "soul") end with an "n." But I see that there are basically two sounds in the end-words: one with a long "O" and one with a short "U." In any case, I like the way the poem imbues the stone woman with a sort of sentience and personality and hints of immortality. The overall mood I get is melancholy and desolation.

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