Today’s prompt is a Two-for-Tuesday prompt. For those new to the challenge, you have the option of writing to the first prompt or the second prompt–or even both if you feel so inclined. Here they are:
- Write a bright poem.
- Write a dark poem.
Sunlight
You want to say it now before it's too late.
Morning yawns sunbeams through a
slit in curtains. You turn and see the face
you touched in the dark last night.
You sneeze. A hand grazes your back.
Letters jumble around your eyelids and
you are overcome by vowels and
sounds pushing against your tongue.
Sunlight hits your eyes,
turns irises from brown to hazel.
He opens one eye; gasps.
Your eyes change color in the light?
This is it. The moment you could
string those vowels together,
say what you both run from every day.
Instead, you say yes.
The light hurts but not as much
as the words burning in your mouth.
For today’s prompt, write a new arrival poem. The new arrival could be a baby or a person. The new arrival might be a car or other piece of technology. Heck, the new arrival might be an idea or poem.
Stage Four
He remembers when the news arrived:
on a Saturday, before their weekly bike ride
around the lake. Kate's helmet slipped from her fingers
when she heard, the doctor's voice
whispering spiderwebs in her ears: stage four.
Cancer so deep it was in her bones.
Surgery. Chemo. Hospice. In three short steps
she was on the stairway to heaven.
The pearly skin he painted during art class
in college became transparent as spring roll
wrappers, a network of blue veins
mapping out her pain.
He wraps a scarf around her head.
She smiles a thank you,
starts writing goodbye letters,
looping the t in her name like
a jump rope.
He doesn't know when she'll go,
only that it will be sooner than he wants.
Now they walk around the complex,
not the lake they've loved for
thirty years. He pushes her wheelchair around
the atrium, gazes at the trees swaying
in the wind, their limbs spread wide,
waiting to greet her with love.
