a collection of completely legitimate poems

Martyr

I'm knee-deep in wildflowers when I get shot. The pain is brief, sharp, and sudden. As I stumble backwards, my vision doubles, and the landscape around me blots, a thousand times the flowers, specs of violet and dots of poppy and smudges of yellow-green. My hands twitch and jump up to my side, where a cold numb feeling is spreading under the skin. I feel the shaft of the arrow, damp, sticky wood, and make my way down to the crisp feathers at the end, before my knees give out and I crash to the ground, pillowy with flora. I can hear my breath, ragged, thinning between blades of high frequency shearing my brain matter apart. I can see the sky above me now, bruise-colored and foggy. I can feel myself shaking, the slick skin under my torn shirt as my fingers grope around the arrow sticking out of my side. I'm bleeding badly, now, I know it, and I can hardly summon what it takes to hold my hands up and see them covered in red. My breaths come fast, my heart struggling to compensate for the amount of blood I'm losing. I'm not shocked, though. It was a long time coming. I just hope it happens fast, so I clutch my side and try to breathe, the powdery scent of lavender filling my lungs. Footsteps in the grass. They get closer. It's the shooter, it must be, coming to see me off. My eyes flutter lazily open as a face comes into view, somebody hovering over me. It takes a second to process through my fragmented vision, but I flinch, yelping at the arrow's movement, when I do. It's the last person I thought it would be."S-Sage?" I get out, tasting blood. "You-"She drops to her knees beside me. I'm shaking harder now, the blood loss uncontrollable, feeling going away. I can't breathe, but my chest moves up and down still, muscles convulsing. Sage's hand covers her mouth. I don't want to believe it, that she would, that she could, but I'm dying on a grassy mountainside and she's holding the bow that shot me. I want to ask her why, I want to ask her how, but my mouth is going numb, too."I'm sorry," she says, and I know it's not out of regret. She had to. But why?"I-" she says, voice breaking, "somebody needs to win, and it can't be you, I couldn't put that on you, I have to go on by myself, somebody else would have-"My neck reluctantly lets me nod. She looks down, she can't look at me any longer. "I'm sorry, do you want me to...."I follow her gaze, blurry-eyed, to the arrow. She'll take it eventually, but if that happens before I die, I'll just bleed out faster. It won't hurt, because I can't feel anything, and it would allow her to get back to the camp before nightfall. She wouldn't have to wait here and listen to me sputter. I twitch-nod, yes.I dully register her hand against my side, touching my own, wrapping around the arrow. I dully register her choked-back sob, under the high wail in my head. I manage one more deep breath, turning my head up at the sky, clutching the flowers on the ground around me, as she pulls the arrow out of me, and I give one last flinch, the scent of blood filling the air around us.She stands up. I see her hand thrust into a salute in the sky above me, before it vanishes and her footsteps do, too. I want to cry, and feel bad for myself, and flip over and crawl to the woods and survive, but I know I never will. I knew she would make it longer than me, and I always knew she had a greater purpose. All I could do was help her, and this is how I'll do that. She would put her chin up and suppress sobs at her sister's burial and take whippings from guards and keep going. I don't want to be the reason she cries, so I won't wail. I just bleed.The wail eats away at my brain. My hand slides off my side, my grip on the grass slack. I close my eyes, and I'm relaxed. My blood will feed the flowers and my blood will feed the revolution. The sky is darkening, or is it just my eyes? My sight is the last to go, no, I'm not breathing anymore. My heart is still.I was always going to die a martyr.