Poems

The Grindylow

A poem using dark fantasy to speak to reality.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedNo-one knows from which waters they
Have swum through, nor in which they stay.
They hide out in the river clay.
Amongst the weed, the green limbs splay.
Of the lake they made a ghetto;
Where once bloomed flowers now holds muck
That drains the soul of all its luck.
The brutish stench can only grow,
For there’s a creature down below
They call the Grindylow.

A child, who stumbled by the bank
Ignorant of its ghoulish rank,
Experienced a morbid yank
And murmured as his heart then sank.
Long-gone are the raven and crow.
The mother had lost her first-born.
She tried with might to sound the horn;
The petrified town would not go.
They dare not meet the Grindylow
That pulls them down below.

They cannot keep the youth away
For it’s a curse that’s come their way.
They multiply with every day;
Their cancer is not kept at bay.
Hamlets, too, become a ghetto.
They tried pave over top floodplain;
Now claws lash out from down the drain;
Their terror's now the status quo.
They dare not meet the Grindylow
That pulls them down below.

Many instances have been since
Where mobs charged on to meet their Prince,
In the hope that they could convince
Him to make the Grindylow mince.
They learnt something that brought more woe:
The King, corrupted by his vice,
Had, into castle moats, enticed
The Grindylows with hauls in tow.
He opened the dungeon to show
The children down below.

He said: “You cannot have them back;
They must go by a foreign track
To our Lord Grindel—all in sack—
For if he were to ever lack
He’d make our Kingdom a ghetto.”
He threatened that each mother’s head
Would come off while they lay in bed
With just one swift and mighty blow,
If the public ever should know
The truth of Grindylows.

Thus none know from which waters they
Have swum through, nor in which they stay.
At night, the maddened mothers pray
The heaviness that, on them, weigh,
Will be relieved by some hero.
For men within their homes are weak
And cowardly will turn their cheek,
Conditioned not to overthrow—
They dare not meet the Grindylow
That pulls them down below.

The Grindylow ~ A Poem by Tom Shaw

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I previewed an almost-finished version of this piece on a livestream some months ago, and have made a couple of small tweaks since I read it out there.

While some know of Grindylows within the context of Harry Potter, fewer know that legends of them are much older than J.K. Rowling’s fiction. Originating from Yorkshire and Lancashire in the United Kingdom, these aquatic water demons linger in stagnant pools and marshes to pray on unsuspecting children.

What interests me about this legend is the supposed connection to Grendel, one of the primary antagonists in the Old English epic Beowulf. Both Grendel and the Grindylow can be seen as marsh-dwelling creatures connected with dark, supernatural forces, eating the humans they capture—all while sharing a similar name. I couldn’t find much literature to confirm how strong this connection is, but nonetheless this link inspired me to create a piece that explores a possible relationship between the two.

To flesh this out further, I drew upon more recent phenomena of child abductions by evil forces. This led me to two topics which I see being frequently discussed, but the connection between the two seems to be both naively or deliberately ignored for the purposes of political point-scoring without upsetting societal order.

The first of these is grooming gangs, which have become a hot-topic for the political right in the UK to highlight the negative impacts on multiculturalism on society, as well as to help some victims who were genuinely targeted based on their race and abused, and then bore witness to authorities being complicit in this abuse.

When I chose to hold off on sharing this poem until this time of year, I didn’t expect it to become even more of a hot-topic than it was at the time… and yet, the charade and theatre around the government’s current “inquiry” into the scandal means this piece is perhaps even more timely than it was back then.

The sensational and passionate speeches made by their crusaders, however, seem to neglect the link to the second topic I drew upon for this piece—one that may provide greater clarity on why these crimes have been allowed to persist and be continuously covered up for so long. This being organised international child abuse.

There is a connection between the street-level grooming gangs that dominate the political discourse, and the abuse of children by the likes of celebrities, politicians, religious institutions and royalty. While it’s easily trackable in the UK’s Labour Party, there is little doubt that it exists across all the major parties in some form, and even within the Home Office under the Conservatives, as Raja Miah points out.

I wonder if we’re witnessing a sort of controlled demolition around this narrative, where an “attack” on the street-level gangs are used to say “we won!” and hide the fact that the rot goes all the way to the top. When certain crusaders against the street-level grooming gangs are known to have strong ties with the IDF, I can only suspect that the relentless focus on the Islamic nationalities of some of the grooming gangs is to deliberately make people think that’s all their is to the story, and prevent people from making the link to higher up the chain and more broadly (as well as provide a convenient reason to continue riling up sentiments against Palestinians). I recommend the following pieces by vanessa beeley and David Miller on this:

I abhor all forms of child abuse, whether by migrant gangs, political movements, for the Catholic Church, for adrenochrome or satanic ritual, whatever it might be. That’s not something I should have to make explicit, but in a time where people have been conditioned to be outraged at every little deviation from a fake binary black-and-white narrative, it sadly needs saying. Moral perversion can be found in all cultures and societies, because all of us have the ability to be tempted to evil. To treat the same kind of perversion in one ethnic group in a different way than in another is, by definition, racist. I’m not interested in those kinds of divide-and-conquer games.

In writing the poem, the thought had crossed my mind to see the rise of a hero who does slay the Grindylow, challenge the corrupt king and the mysterious Lord Grindel. I suppose that already exists to some degree in Beowulf. Whether we will see a hero in the real-life scenarios that inspired this piece, one not afflicted by a hypocrisy in their approach, remains to be seen. Perhaps that’s because it’s meant to be one of us—or even, all of us.

Thank you greatly for reading this one all the way through to the end. I will leave you with this question: where is there terror in your life, and how will you be the one to end its reign?