A Halloween Story Poem by Poet Dragon

It all begin as grains of sand,
covering a place both wide and flat
open to the moonlight as Luna rises.
When the first breeze blows,
from a whisper to a howl and back
the dead trees, like skeletons,
shiver from cold and fear.
One by one the trees uproot
crackling and rustling, yet silent.
The open space becomes bigger
as they retreat from old knowledge,
waiting for the tide to rise.
One younger stays behind and watches.
Stares at the sand, and ponders,
reaches out and touches it with a root.
The elders, black and dead,
the home to owls and spider webs,
already mourn the youth.
At a touch the grains flicker
like starlight come to life for a moment.
Black shadows, where spirits might hide
if they weren't afraid, too, creep upward.
The sand begins to bubble,
darkness shifts and flows with purpose.
Youth is lost on the youth, foolish youth.
Its root, pulled back at the darkness,
has turned black and gray with ash.
Like torpid terror the ash crawls
up the root and outward, up the trunk
to where leaf and branch shake
and fruit falls like tears of regret.
Now the sand heaves and towers
over the remnant of the youth.
Quickly dispersed by the wind,
dusty ash rises up into the dark clouds
gathering over a moon now red.
The ceremony is nearly met.
Tiny, pitch black grains of sand stand up,
now given meager life by this evil,
and run away as individual thoughts.
Past the trees they scatter, screaming
warnings and imprecations and horror.
The grove stands its ground,
given purpose and meaning by this night.
Where the sand once was, now a bulge grows
pale, even in the blood of the moon.
Rising higher and higher,
until even the clouds eschew the sky.
This abomination is pale like bone
covered by an aura of black so deep
that its meaning has never been needed
except for this moment, this single instant.
A terrible beast smiles at the night
and a tongue of rancid mold slips out
between teeth like tombstones.
When the world begins to shudder
at the presence of this cancerous evil,
the grove moves, and moans as it goes.
Lightning laughs from the clear sky,
lashing out at the wood song's meaning.
Calling back the black sand, to its duty,
repairing the wound in the veil.
Frozen images cover the wound
where the pale monster rose up to consume,
like moonlight shining through stained glass.
In the images, spirits swirl and play,
calling back to their master, no longer afraid.
Their night is over.
All in the space of the moon crossing the sky
these events took place: the running,
the rising, the loathing, and the calling.
Now come the true screams. Painful and
invigorating they slip into cracks
where humans cannot hear them, but they shudder
and they flow, across the wound, into it.
As the beast is put to slumber once more,
sand grains poised as cowards among the tree roots
run out and jump into their place.
A flat field of creeping black.
Then the black flows inward, to the center,
and downwards to the depths and is gone.
And the trees settle once again around the clearing
to again await the culmination of their existence
next Halloween.