The swamp of fear and dismay,
A realm of no escape and no hope,
Where nightmares ruled slumber
And hypnosis betrayed ingenuity.
Idiotic mirrors cast spells over the crowd of senseless ghosts,
Deprived of every speck of wisdom,
Wandered in the darkness without a reference,
Believing the lie as truth.
Sour tears fell upon the garden of obliviousness,
A place of refuge for those who sought to destroy memories,
Confident that the pain would disappear,
As a vanishing dream in the valley of grief.
But the shadows only deepened,
And the weight of forgotten sorrow lingered still.
In the labyrinth of shattered dreams,
Each step carried the echoes of forgotten screams.
Unseen needles pulled at the strings of consciousness,
Twisting reality into grotesque shapes,
Ghouls bled into nightmares.
In the distance, a phantom bell tolled,
Ringing for the lost souls who kneeled before oblivion.
They whispered prayers to a silent void,
Sought release, yet were trapped in endless woe.
The fog of despair thickened,
The swamp of fear swallowed all light.
And the stars themselves flickered out,
As if extinguished by unseen forces.
Through tangled vines of despair,
The withering winds howled secrets untold.
And the void, cold and indifferent,
Watched over the endless night of the forsaken.
Faint glimmers of false hope flickered,
Only to be swallowed whole
By the ever-hungry void.
In this realm where time did not exist,
The living and dead became entangled,
Their souls entwined in a dance
Of eternal unrest.
The swamp of fear stretched further,
Claiming all that wandered near.
In the end, nothing remained
But relics of forsaken entities
And dreams that had turned to dust.
In the suffocating dark,
A silent scream drowned in the abyss,
And the cursed lantern faded,
Leaving nothing but shadows,
As the swamp of fear spread across an eternity,
And all sank into oblivion.
Esther Elizabeth Racah
