Poem of the Week: “Terror” by Stephen Sexton

In his poem “Terror,” Stephen Sexton transports readers back in time and leads them through a fantastical environment complete with constellations, werewolves, knights, swords, and daggers. Following a family of three hiding from the moon-lit nighttime and its accompanying creatures, Sexton poses commentary on fear, historical legends, and what parents choose to share with their children. Almost serving as a poem about the childhood fear of the dark, his final line leaves us wondering: if not the werewolf, who is responsible “for what night does”? And what does night do?

Terror

First arrived a pair of antique broadswords
passed point to pommel through the letterbox
in a jute sack, with no return address.
Lancelot, Melion, Galahad, O
all the knights we know are dead.

We changed light bulbs all morning,
unpacked books, bled radiators.
Albert on the lawn introduced himself
to each of the daffodils and we began to live there
and Scorpio slipped into Sagittarius.

Some daggers made from cassowary bone
came bubble-wrapped, and anthropologists
of some renown determined their origin
to be Papua New Guinea, mid-18th century.
Housewarming gifts, we told little Albert.

Though we loved the moon, the moon
could not defend us, loving as it does the sea.
For weeks we slept like avocados.
An avocado is its own unit of time, we thought,
goosebumped and spoiling in our bedroom.

Had we known the werewolves were so many
we would not have come, my wife said to Albert.
He loves werewolves the way terror has an opposite.
They cannot themselves be responsible
for what night does, she said.

— Stephen Sexton, from Cheryl’s Destinies (2024)