Young Writers Society

Memories dance
on the fringe of her conscience,
hazy and forsaken,
as the years drag on
and on.

Her skin is dry.
Deep creases litter her eyes,
her neck, her hands,
and her hair has long ago
transposed to silver,
no longer the vibrant
cherry red it once was.

Her twisted fingers shake
plagued by arthritis,
and her once lithe,
athletic legs have grown
short and wiry.

Some mornings
she awakes in a
cackling scream
as she relives the death of
her husband,
in lucid detail,
his twisted wheelchair and
his scarlet blood dripping
to the gray pavement,
until the memory
wisps away once more.

Her memory has erased,
the years she raised her child,
the years she danced,
in the fields with her darling,
her baby girl.

And every night
before she lays her head
to rest,
she winds the key
to the music box her father
gave her on her twelfth
birthday,
but of course she doesn't
remember that.

Day after day,
the same progne subis,
the same Purple Martin,
the same swallow,
sits on the branch
of the maple outside her door frame,
and she listens to its song,
a eerie melody of
recollection and
passion.

For her,
time is of the past,
a dusty picture frame
in which the girl
she once was,
the stubborn girl who fell in
love,
is frozen within.

She hallucinates
every so often and sees her
long dead mother sitting
at the lonely piano
in the corner of the room
shaking her head in
disappointment.

She walks barefoot
around her home,
perhaps remembering
how she used to
run shoe-less through the grass
every summertime
as a child.

And while she silently watches
the shooting stars fall
from the sky,
she folds her cold hands
onto her lap,
wishing that her father
was still there to hold her
when she was scared,
and that her mother
had once somehow
been proud of her.

As she bathes
Christmas Eve,
long-dried tears escape
her shrunken eyes,
as she weeps for her past,
for herself and her now empty life
and so she sleeps,
a dreamless slumber
that expands across
eternity.