Charon’s Ferry

A Poem by Grant

I gotta ease up on the Greek mythology

I’d once read of a place like this,
But thought it mothered by a pen.
I thought it too horrific�"too grim, too bleak and wicked�"
Yet, here I am.

There was no sky, but a swirling black cloud
And an eerie mist that rose from the ground.
And that wet ground we stood upon
Was watered by the Acheron.

I, like the rest in that misty shroud,
Stood there faceless in a faceless crowd.
Distance had each from another severed
Lest we should think we were in this together.

Every soul faced in one direction
Toward a chasm in the mist that they all looked on,
A gaping abyss that the darkness dressed in,
A cave that swallowed the Acheron.

From the abyss emerged a rickety skiff
That drifted along the still river.
On the skiff stood a stiff silhouette
Scouting out souls to deliver.

Borne from a union of Night with Darkness,
Cloaked in black with eyes of red,
The sceptred ferryman of the Acheron,
Silent Shepherd of the Dead.

Slowly he rowed with the base of his staff,
And slowly his boat, in linear path,
Passed by those sinners at glacial speed,
And crept it’s way closer and closer to me.

I thought I’d known death,
That Atropos cut my mortal strand,
But something in me died again
When Charon offered me his hand.

And so, I sat by Charon’s cloak
With stilled breath and a frozen heart,
Riding in death as I had in life,
With actionless thoughts in a loveless dark.

As our ferry approached the dismal chasm,
I mulled on my each and every sin.
On the walls of the cave in blood was written:
“All hope abandon ye who enter in.”