I think I'd like to read two more poems.
This is a poem about vampires.
The poem is called "Voices Answering Back: The Vampires."
And the poem is spoken by the vampires
as a kind of choral group.
The poem takes place in the present.
In other words, in a time when people generally
no longer believe in vampires.
However, the vampires who are, of course, still
there have banded together in order
to come to terms with this problem of disbelief.
There are a number of facts about vampires
that the poem touches upon which you may be familiar
with from Bram Stoker's novel or from the many films
about vampires.
Vampires are, of course, the undead, those who live forever,
but only at night, who must sleep
during the day in their coffins on their native soil,
and who at evening rise to seek out
the blood of the living, who themselves
bitten by the vampire may turn into vampires.
Vampires cast no reflection in mirrors.
They may pass through cobwebs without breaking them.
They possess the strength of many mortal men,
but the cross will frighten them.
And of all the ways of disposing of a vampire,
you can drive the stake through his heart, or in some versions
if you expose him to sunlight, his body
returns to its natural age.
And since most vampires are hundreds of years old,
it means that he disintegrates.
This last point, this point about the sunlight
is particularly relevant to the poem
because the vampires in the poem are
trying to come to terms with this problem of the sun,
figuring that if they can go out during the day,
they have a much better chance of survival.
There's also the theory that vampires can turn into bats,
but Professor Abraham Van Helsing
in Dracula: Prince of Darkness claims that, in fact, that's
only a myth.
"Voices Answering Back: The Vampires."
Rising in lamplight, dying at dawn,
grim burials in sheds and cellars,
the rats scuttling through holes, and the days
following in their tracks.
Exiled here, we named the hours since you first
forgot to be afraid.
Once departed, we became only ourselves
with the salt on our tongues and the cold for company.
So deft in escape, so practiced in dying,
you might have learned from us.
But each time the easiest trick worked.
The brandished cross the empty mirror.
You could not see us our steps upon the stairs.
And while you stumbled after bats in the garden,
we climbed quietly from the upstairs window
down the drainpipe.
And through all the parties, you never
heard what we were saying.
It was something about desire, what
we had in common even then.
In your silence, you feared us, always winning at the end,
but do you think nothing lingered past dawn shadowed
among the gathered elms?
Do not be mistaken.
We heard you walking through our dreams.
We felt death moving between your hands.
Now we are waking early, practicing with sunlight.
Now we pass unharmed beneath your terrible star,
eyes covered, hands in our pockets,
for the rules have always said if you stop believing in us,
we inherit everything.