Mudslide

Adapted from my poem, THE MUDSLIDE (below), and based on a personal childhood story.
The Mudslide
Once, as my mind remembers,
We lay in nightly slumbers,
When stirred the mountain giants,
And woke wights, beasts, rocks and plants.
They, guardians of the mountains,
Their terror across the plains.
Tonight the behemoths fight,
So did the sires say that night,
As the earth shifted beneath.
The hills shall cleave when they breathe,
Fountains shall break when they turn,
So shall the well and the quern.
A war raged within the hills,
And out blew our water mills,
Wounds broke out on the hillside,
Graves, old and new, opened wide,
Households lost in the mudflow,
Lost forever far below.
And come dawn the village grieved,
For the dead and the bereaved.
On the doors hung crimson cloths,
To calm down the behemoths.
Orisons, the elders said,
Oblations for every head.
But the scar remains.
©P.M Quinns