Grapes of Putrescence

They once gleamed with velvet in the sun,

indigo skin aglow with carmine flame;

the air was drunk as sweetness just begun,

beauty sculpted slowly as decay came.

.

But time, with bruising hand, is here to claim

what once belonged to life, adorned in vivid flesh;

silken worms and lustrous flies now join the game,

as fragrance ripe with rot calls them to the catch.

.

O fruit, that teaches love: what once was ripe and fresh

can be the ruin for us all like sour wine;

in each bite the ghost of pleasure leaves caress

to show that even in decay, beauty is divine.

.

For only when you fall, and sweetness spills,

does the tongue learn how desire ripens, and kills.

This poem was born as the result of my attempt to write a sonnet to "The Sonnet of Shadows" challenge.

I decided to go with the Spencerian sonnet with the rhyme scheme of abab bcbcb cdcd ee. Which I don't know how much I nailed because my mind goes blank whenever I try to find rhyming words. (Don't even think of expecting a iambic pentameter from me in English... It wasn't mentioned in the prompt anyway...)

My muse was a bunch of grapes I forgot on a rock once in the forest at work, and the next day I found it half rotten, covered in sticky juice, flies and worms. Yet, somehow there was still something beautiful in it. (IKR? My mom says I am a bit morbid sometimes.)

It might sound grotesque, but the idea to write about it came when the other day we passed by a corpse of a deer that was hit by a car, and just left there by the road. It reminded me of one of my favorite poems, The Carcass by Baudelaire.

For the title, I choose my old poetry tumblr blog's name.

I never liked sonnets because most of what we read at school were cheesy, all about love but after doing some research I figured people wrote all kinds of creepy, dark and disturbing sonnets. So why not?