“A Relic of Dragonalia: A Conversation Poem” (2026) — Inspiration Behind the Poem
“Don’t forget me. When’s it going to be my turn?”
Every so often, perhaps once every hundred years, a superior creature is born into this world. Their early life is scarred by such abuse, pain, heartbreak, tragedy, desperation, and inescapable despair that, if they survive past childhood, only two paths become available for them to follow: the first path leads to hopelessness, failure, ruin and, quite often, early death; the second path leads to greatness. There is no in-between. Average, everyday mediocrity is unknown to the being who lived through such an upbringing — it’s either the world or nothing at all. The lesser mind is destined for failure; there is no choice in the matter. They learn at an early age to hate themselves and in turn spread their hatred around the world like disease, infecting others. The superior creature, however, chooses greatness and becomes a source of love and inspiration to everyone she meets.
The world lost that superior creature last December. And yet the world didn’t stop. Life carried on as usual. The night sky was still bestrewn with stars and the moon still shone. The sun still rose the next morning and the winter songbirds still quietly sang. To some this may seem like a comfort. It’s not. Her death was met with a deafening silence and the echo of that silence is all I hear.
Her name was Ali, and although her beauty was legendary (some might even say Goddess-like), her superiority in this world was kindness. She made everyone feel like the most important person on earth. Not only was mediocrity unknown to her, so was selfishness — never would she put herself before others. There’s a saying that no one will remember the fancy clothes you wear, the self-important car you drive, or your odious source of income, but they will always, always remember how you make them feel. Those lucky enough to have met Ali will never, ever forget the way she made them feel. Ali made you feel that there was beauty in this world, and that life was worth living. One became attached to her at once, and one does not recover from such an attachment.
“Fanny Harville was a very superior creature, and his attachment to her was indeed attachment. A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman. He ought not; he does not.”
—Jane Austen, Persuasion (1817)
In March of 2026, shortly after I finished reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), which broke my heart all over again with the story’s uncanny similarities to my own past, I began writing a poem that would become “A Relic of Dragonalia: A Conversation Poem”. The piece was written for Ali, and it was recently published by 518 Publishing. Although there are particular lines I want to mention in detail, I still find it incredibly difficult to write about. However, the publisher published an interview of sorts last month on their website, which includes some of the real-life inspirations behind my poem. I am publishing that interview below, including a few stanzas from my poem. You can find the original interview on 518 Publishing’s website here.
1. Tell us a little about yourself. How long have you been writing and what inspired you to start?
Attempting to describe the year that inspired me to start writing would be akin to the trials of Atlas and call back to my mind miserable memories that I’d much rather forget. Without going into too much detail, I truly began writing properly during the first week of January 2015 while riding the Metro into DC toward a soulless career that specialized in bureaucracy and sycophantic deference — I won’t deny that the train’s arrival each morning came with momentary ideas of Kareninian despair. It was an incredibly difficult time in my life, and, while experiencing the strangely inspiring effects of a half-depressed, half-asleep delirium on my early morning train rides, writing poems (bloody awful sonnets, to be sure) became my daily ritual. A year later I had my first publication and I’ve been writing obsessively ever since.
2. Are you a 1st time published author or have you been published before? If so, what?
My first book is A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems (Gothic Keats Press, 2021), an illustrated collection of poetry inspired by my incurable passion for Romanticism, all things Gothic, folklore, and place and landscape. I was honored to have several poems within the collection first appear in 518 Publishing’s Influence of the Moon (2019), including “Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey”, a poem that still holds a special place in my heart. My first novel is forthcoming in 2027/28.
3. What’s the name of your Droids & Dragons poem and where did you get the inspiration for it?
The title of my piece for 518 Publishing’s Droids & Dragons anthology is “A Relic of Dragonalia: A Conversation Poem”. It is terribly difficult for me to write about, or even contemplate, but the poem was inspired by, written for, and dedicated to Ali (1974-2025), someone beloved to me who tragically died in December 2025. We hadn’t spoken in years, but in September 2025, after a series of unfortunate events that occurred in my life in rather quick succession, I decided to write her a long letter telling her how happy I was for her that she was successful, seemingly happy, had a beautiful family, and that in all these years of silence I had never once forgotten her. Less than three months later she was gone, and gone forever. I will never know if she read my letter.
The poem’s freer form and somewhat prose-like style is unusual for me. I tend to write poetry in a more traditional, formalized structure, paying close attention to metrical schemes and stanzaic form — one of my favorites to use is a variation of the Spenserian stanza. However, as I began writing the piece, brooding on Ali and the manner of her death, I found that composing it in my normal style and method was simply impossible; I just couldn’t do it. Although I wrote the majority of my poem rather quickly in an almost single breath of thought, I took much inspiration from the “conversation poems” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), especially “The Eolian Harp” and “Frost at Midnight”.
Lastly, the “relic” in the poem actually did exist. I based it on a little dragon figurine that Ali had bought me as a gift at the Maryland Renaissance Festival (also called the Renn Fest). It was made of either glass or crystal and it was a most curious shade of green, a favorite color of mine — although that beautiful shimmer of green did not magically change with the seasons as I described in my poem, it did indeed appear different when held beneath certain light. I kept the little dragon for many years, packed away in some unknown box in some unknown location. Unfortunately, after a difficult move two years ago, I found the box and discovered the dragon within a small velvet bag, broken in two.
4. What is your favorite snippet from your poem?
I never told you (O how could I?), and now I never can,
but I saw your Tolkienian fire-Drake years ago,
the graphite-pen watercolor scorched on Bristol board of bone-white
titled “Dragon for Lulu”, — one day she’ll treasure it, don’t worry —
redolent of those wingèd Germanic fire-breathers, serpent-birds
of Hell’s paradise who bejeweled the Northumbrian night skies,
comet-like they set the still night on fire, dripped dragon-sickness
of hoarded gold and glistening-wet jewels.
Remember we talked about it, twenty years ago now?
We thought those who long watched the burning skies became glitter-eyed,
infected with lust, greed, and obsession for war — O such trails of fire
presaged the Viking Age, or so we loved to imagine, to wonder, to dream.
And it was then, so many years ago now (how can it be so long ago?),
when you gave me that curiously green gemstone, cooly smooth
as volcanic glass and burning like ice — you told me it was Merlin’s
piece of dragon-bone, and how I loved to believe you when you told
such beautiful tales of fantasy.
O how I’ve treasured this gift, either gemstone or dragon-bone,
this curious creation of so many shades of green: velvet-soft jade
in the spring, and musical just before Beltane the way fairy-flower
bluebells sing; emerald-dark in the autumn as the shadows lengthen for Samhain,
and almost black as bloodstone in December with flakes of red;
in the sunshine it sparkled like a chrome-green opal or pearl;
in the cold moonlight it glowed a ghostly pale green, otherworldly,
and in the night’s silence it seemed to whisper
of voices unheard, of shapes unseen.
5. What is your favorite book?
It is impossible for me to choose only one book. Instead, I will list two books that I’ve read thus far in 2026 that have particularly inspired me — both of these books I’ve read before.
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë — I first read Emily’s Gothic masterpiece many years ago in my youth, but I was far too young and inexperienced at the time to fully appreciate the literary brilliance of the story, which is interesting considering Emily was only in her late twenties when she wrote it. I began rereading Wuthering Heights this year in the dark month of January, made unbearably darker by the tragedy of December. I’m not one for spoilers so I won’t be specific, but certain parts of the novel were heartbreakingly similar to what had just occurred in my life (even details of the past and a particular number of years were accurate), all of which made this one of the most emotionally difficult books I’ve ever read. Although the novel spoke to me in ways few novels have (or probably ever will), Emily Brontë, for me, above all else, has always been and always will be the writer of beautifully Gothic, melancholic poetry, and, as someone who’s been writing poetry obsessively these past ten years (much of it tinctured with Gothic themes of death, decay, haunting regret, obsessive brooding, madness, and all things uncanny and phantasmal), I recognized almost immediately that Wuthering Heights was written by the brilliant mind of a writer who considered herself a poet first. Coincidentally, shortly after finishing the novel, I came across a recently published essay by Dr. Claire O’Callaghan titled “How Wuthering Heights was shaped by Emily Brontë’s gothic poetry”. It’s a rare treat indeed for me to read essays about my beloved writers and poets in which the author’s ideas and conclusions perfectly fit my own, but Dr. O’Callaghan did just that, writing that Emily’s novel “stands apart from other Victorian novels precisely because it was crafted by a poet who never ceased thinking in verse. Its windswept moors, restless spirits, and love that defies death were first imagined in poetry, where snow falls endlessly over the cold earth and love endures beyond the grave.”
Possession (1990) by A.S. Byatt — If there was ever a novel written by someone else that I wish I had written instead, it would undoubtedly be Byatt’s Possession. Without giving away major spoilers, her novel concerns the lives of two literary scholars who, brought together by a shared enthusiasm for nineteenth-century poetry, research and obsess over the lives and handwritten love letters between two long-dead poets — there is also an important trip to Whitby (a seaside village dear to my heart) and even an epic poem based on the legend of the faery Mélusine. These are all literary passions of mine, and not only have I written several essays on John Keats’s love letters to Fanny Brawne, which contain some of the most beautiful and passionate passages that Keats ever wrote (“But if you will fully love me, though there may be some fire, ‘twill not be more than we can bear when moistened and bedewed with Pleasures”), I have also written my own poem based on Mélusine. The piece, which I wrote after rereading Byatt’s novel in 2021, is a personal narrative poem of sorts, and, besides the stanzas of hallucinatory madness (Coleridgean in spirit) and literary elements of folklore and legend, it is essentially a metaphysical retelling of Mélusine’s story. Although I had written several stanzas years earlier after imagining a “Melusinean vision” floating upon the enchanted waters of the Cantabrian Sea while living in Asturias, there is no doubt in my mind that I would never have been inspired to return to my poem without the brilliant storytelling of Byatt’s Possession.
“Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living…
I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
—Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights