Christiaan Sabatelli
Very Few Good Dragons
…………after Mary Karr
Not the embodiment of chaos, skinned
in scale and muscle, nor the endless appetite
and foul tempered claws.
Not the fire leaping from jaws,
making the trees shine like copper and blood,
the color of a hoard guarded
away from the world. My friend the medievalist
says we misunderstand
the dragons of legend and nightmare,
of role-playing games that bear their name.
To understand them, he says,
picture a parent whose children have flown
from the nest, the emptiness
suddenly cavernous around them.
Gone is the youth that once defined them, the hobbies
and habits of who they were. Unremembered is the self
that used to be. So, they seek out small joys, trinkets
of identity, and guard the glittering treasure
against any who would take that away, again.
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Christiaan Sabatelli is a Rhysling Award nominee in poetry, and holds an MFA, in poetry, from the University of Florida. While at UF he worked with Michael Hoffman and Deborah Gregor, and he completed his thesis under the guidance of William Logan. His poetry has been published in a number of national magazines, including Writer’s Journal, A Gathering of Tribes, The Adirondack Review, Star*Line, Abyss & Apex, The Sierra Nevada Review, and New Collage. In the fall of 2025 his first chapbook of poems, Personal Mythologies, was published by Bottlecap Press.
Author’s Backstory/Crafting Elements: “Very Few Good Dragons” started, as many pieces of mine do, as a half-awake thought before my ego wakes up. I love the Mary Karr poem, “Who the Meek Are Not,” and something about the structure of it had come into my sleeping mind, so that when I woke, I had a rough version of the lines “My friend the medievalist / says we misunderstand / the dragons of legend and nightmare” repeating, like an ear worm, in my brain. From there I started building. Karr’s poem sets up a structure of defining what her subject is not before providing a metaphor for what the thing is instead. I set about doing the same. The negation part was easy, dragons are rife in popular culture, but then to provide a compelling metaphor for what dragons are instead took some time. The fact that dragons are always depicted as solo creatures made me think of my own experience as a single father, whose children are adult and moved out. That became the metaphor, and through a bit of drafting that idea was honed into what is in the poem now. Finally, the title came from a Tolkien quote.
Editor’s Comments/Image Credit: The concerned expression on the dragon’s face perfectly captures the “humanity” of a dragon rather than the typical villainization of them.
The image is from the art of dragons on a ceiling of the Kenjin-dera temple, Kyoto, Japan,
published on January 18, 2020 (UTC) NIKON CORPORATION, NIKON D5500. The photograph by Sei on Unsplash.* Subsequently, it was modified with Prisma/Surf filter to more easily see the rendering by the Editor.
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