This Haunted Mary

A poetic ode to Mrs. Shelley’s genius

This haunted Mary, Who made that written creature Of hers immortal,

One storm powered night, When in a fellowship of Writers and poets,

The rogue Byron tasked His peers to write frightful tales And entertain all.

Mary rose the most, And inspired by dark dreams Of man and monster,

She wrote the tale of A stitched Lucifer, cast out By his God father.

This rejected soul Becoming vengeful angel Against a cruel world.

And though lost to ice, The Creature lives forever, His mother Mary.

This was originally a three line haiku (inspired by my original drawing above), now expanded into a multi-stanza haiku. I’ve always been fascinated by the events that led to Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’; when the writer, her love Percy, Lord Byron and others spent the summer of 1816 by Lake Geneva, Switzerland. A ghost story challenge by Byron led to ‘The Vampyre’, by John Polidori (which itself would lead to ‘Dracula’), but more importantly, the challenge birthed ‘Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus’, by Mary. Thanks for reading.