The Hangman's Whisper Poem by HEG George

A gathering of whispers travel from breath to breath,
much like trains picking up chattering gossips along its
route. With breath held, they stand and wait to join the
last exhale of the wretch stood on the hanging platform.

Whilst a judge washes the atrocity from a hand that held
a vacillating gavel. Forced into a considered judgement,
his conscience is clear. Much as a whip of feathers
forces the killer into killing more. Whilst the birds

above scream a lurid act of contrition for the return of
such pathos, their miniature thoughts oscillating between
current events and the feeding of hungry chicks. And hubris
carries a last meal beneath distaining eye, lost to nature's

sight, as it nears a fading gaol door. And whisper's finger
crawls around the corner, ready to cosette a neck held within
a gallows noose; hanging bulged against the fibre of its hemp
curtain call. Like a veined muscle strains against the skin.

And so, black in thought from the final deed, whisper
reaches its sanctuary hole, shaped long in the ground.
And whisper's voice, after watching the earth worms preparing
the way for the soft flesh to come, speaks one final time
'Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine'

And an earth-harried soul is finally released