Originally written for Sammi Scribbles Weekend Writing Challenge- Using Question in exactly 84 words but I didn’t get back to edit it down until today.
Questions hang in the air
Like heavy coastal fog
On cool autumn mornings
Eternal questions of humanity:
All the whys, the wonderings--
Never answered prayers--
Laying pressed between the
Pages of a book like brown,
Dried flowers—forgotten,
Having lost their sentiment.
Speak the differences
Among roses, weeds, wildflowers—
Inconsequential answers
For inconsequential questions.
Could sense of counting
Out the hours be sliced
Like blood, blooming meat
To find truth absolute
Like high priestesses of old,
Scry the answer
In a blood filled bowl?
The widow colors the sky
The ground, the trees,
The winds with cold and heat
Of all that cannot be spoken,
Of spirits tethered to stone.
You may never know she is there.
She may wear the red nose.
She may laugh with you.
She may hold out her hands to help.
All so you are not overwhelmed by her presence.
She hides within her weeds.
Sometimes she hides within the willows.
She may smell of pomegranates
Or roses at midnight,
The scents betray her presence.
But you will not see her arms and hands
Covered in thorns and trickling with blood,
The tears of her body, dripping away,
Speaking in tongues no one can understand,
As she stands alone.
She sees history through a broken prism
Of her words never strong enough to bind
Love to prayers weighted with magic enough
To fly straight to God’s ear, to be heard,
To be answered, to raise flowers of miracles.
In the end, the widow is left,
Singing colors of grief.
When all the praise singers have left her
In the muddy soil leavings of wicked tongues,
Gone on to daily lives, the day to day,
The widow stands,
Singing colors of grief,
Covered in thorns.
That is me
I am of my own making.
Rather than ignore, pretend
A pretty sky for my façade—
I chose to make of myself,
A real thing, a living thing,
A patchwork quilt of scars:
Sown together scraps of terror,
Of pain, of suffering,
Of the dark wells into which I fell,
Of the dark wells I clawed and crawled,
bloodied fingered, nails torn off,
Out from the depths,
Of the wealth of human darkness
I have known, of my failures, of my triumphs—
Follow the stitching with your fingers
If you wish to understand
The quilt that I am
Though the batting be made
Of my tears, my blood, my skin,
My scars, bits of my spirit, bits of my soul—
The quilt that I am
Can offer you more
Than any villager can.
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