Writer's Grove

Zombie Sestina

Gotta thank Neil Gaiman for tweeting about this—as he said, there’s not enough formal zombie poetry. I couldn’t agree more! A poet named Roz Kaveney posted 14 sonnets on her LiveJournal page, which she collectively calls “A Shamble of Zombies”—here’s the link, they start at February 3. Check ’em out!

SEE? They are magnificent! Roz Kaveney is the world’s premier zombie sonneteer! I could not hope to match that—would not dream of trying. But I would like to contribute to the world’s burgeoning store of zombie literature, so I offer this zombie sestina instead:

In this gray dawn after the apocalypse,
We fight and scratch to do naught but survive
As shambling horrors seek to rip our flesh
And moan at the smell of succulent brains
(Still thinking inside our skulls for a time—
Until they are fed, or we are undead).

If my children were to rise undead
It would be my personal apocalypse;
I would resign the remainder of my time
And no longer would I scramble to survive
In a world where my kids want to eat my brains
And suck on the hot juices of my flesh.

I could bear the consumption of my flesh
If I knew I would not return undead
And thoughtlessly eat the thoughts in people’s brains.
The death of thought is the true apocalypse,
For we hardly think now; instead we survive
On instinct and huddle against the time

When we must end, only to start a damned time
Of shambling and groaning for tender flesh.
Can art or music or poetry survive
This howling chorus of the undead?
The Louvre burned in the apocalypse
And Britney ate Lady Gaga’s brains.

Now there is naught of the sublime in brains
For those who remain in this cold, gray time:
If Neil Gaiman survived the apocalypse
He is not writing, but protecting his flesh
From snow-covered legions of the undead
And noshing on jars of old marmite to survive.

Fear of undeath is why we struggle to survive;
Fear is all that lives now in our brains,
Fear and despair and monotone song of undead
Who shamble and rot and wait for the time
When they can sink their brown teeth into our flesh
And complete the zombie apocalypse.

Though my sons and I yet survive, the undead
Apocalypse has already claimed our brains
And our flesh will shamble too in time.