#HookedOnPoetry: Featuring “Allegra” by Christina Sng
This week’s #HookedOnPoetry project was supposed to run as a four-part feature, but we will only be featuring three writers this week due to my computer malfunction. You can pop over to Oh, for the Hook of a Book! to see Tuesday’s feature of Erik Hofstatter’s micropoems and return tomorrow as well for another new set of poems from an emerging artist.
Today, I want to offer a sample of my good friend Christina Sng’s poetic work. Christina is a Bram Stoker Award-winner with her previous poetry collection A Collection of Nightmares. Her follow-up collection, A Collection of Dreamscapes, is available now. This poem below, “Allegra,” is excerpted from it. I hope you find it as beautiful as I do. Christina has a way of making you feel like you’ve stepped into another world.
See you back here next week for more poetry features.
Enjoy!
Erin Al-Mehairi
ALLEGRA
By Christina Sng
Her name soothes
The mighty beast, enthralled
By her ethereal song.
A tale
Extending far beyond
Our collective memories,
A relic of echoes
Unbound by the years
And retold
By Allegra,
The protagonist
Of songs.
*
It began with love,
Of Prometheus and
Allegra, his love.
They danced through time,
Entwined in a symphony
Of fire and ice,
Swirling amid
The ancient stars
They called by name.
They were there
At their christening,
At the birth of the world;
Our universe,
Their interstellar playground.
And Allegra sang,
Her song stirred
The heart of life
Into bloom,
Planting barren planets
And moons with
Seeds from her hands.
Prometheus, jealous
Of Allegra’s passion,
Returned to raze the land.
Ignited, his fires burned,
Annihilating flourishing worlds
Allegra had sung to birth.
And Allegra,
In silence and grief,
Departed from him,
Fell to Earth,
With whom
She fell in love,
And sang,
Stirring
The muted land.
For Prometheus,
She built a pyre, a promise
To spare Earth his fire.
And for a million years
Life sprang up, painted
In incandescent colors.
Her hands shed corpuscles.
She’d been clawing the soil.
And Allegra,
Exhausted,
Fell into eternal sleep,
Enveloped
In the red and green
Flowers and leaves
She’d beckoned awake.
*
The cycles pass
In a harried frenzy.
But her song
Endures the twisted
Passage of time.
It is our voice
That echoes it.
A plea to the fire bearer,
To him who destroys peace.
And again,
The symphony of ice
Quenches the flame.
Prometheus, redirected,
Leaves us
Untouched again.
Christina Sng
Christina Sng is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A COLLECTION OF NIGHTMARES (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared in numerous venues worldwide and received nominations in the Rhysling Awards, the Dwarf Stars, the Elgin Awards, and honorable mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and the Best Horror of the Year. Visit her at www.christinasng.com and connect on social media @ChristinaSng.
A Collection Of Dreamscapes
In A Collection of Dreamscapes, Christina Sng broadens her horizons by exploring fairy tales, mythology and even dark fantasy. This follow up includes a healthy dose of monsters and darkness alongside some more fantastic, dreamlike verses.
“My new collection is a montage of dreamscapes from mythologies, fairy tales, dystopias, transformations, and the dark side of human nature,” Sng said. “Woven throughout the book are themes of empowerment and the human capacity to channel our deepest inner strength to do whatever it takes to survive.”
For readers this is sure to be a must-needed addition to any collection and will appeal broadly but widely to fans of dark fiction, science fiction, and fantasy.
You can buy A Collection Of Dreamscapes from Amazon UK & Amazon US
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