As tides rise and fall,
Surely as the seasons change,
Chapters of my life.
She sang out sweetly
And in her song I could hear
My own heart breaking
In darkness, we surrender as if by choice
To muted slumbers, in safe delight.
But it’s the tiny blackbird that finds his voice
There in the daunting dead of night.
His song cuts the silence, filling the sky
And from it, a spreading symphony is born.
Indeed, it’s the fire in your spirit which must never die,
Let it sing, like the blackbird, at each new dawn.
Qualms rise like the tide,
Disrupting peaceful waters.
Sleepless ebb and flow.
Two people talking.
A universe opening.
Time disappearing.
May that iris dance
In an endless, playful breeze
To find you, at peace.
(To fond memories of a dear friend, gone from this world but never forgotten)
There were no monsters under my bed that night. No demons keeping me awake. The shadows dancing across my ceiling were, surprisingly, only shadows. Sleep came easily to me and I welcomed it.
In fact, there were no monsters lurking in any of our rooms that night. For on that night the beasts were gathering in a cloud outside in the darkness. And in our beds, blinded by the promise of a single night’s peace, we were wrapped snugly in the calm before our most fearsome storm and rocked gently to sleep before it tore our sky in two.
None of us stirred when the air shifted restlessly and grew thick with menace, or when the changing winds grew violent in the distance. Not a sound could be heard. Not the surprised howling of the air, not the trees being torn aggressively from side to side, not the singular piercing strike of lightning that brought an end to the storm’s rage, or even the deafening thunder that filled the night and lingered in the sudden cold silence.
No, none of us witnessed the storm they brought, nor do we know how far it was from where we lay. We only know that we rose with confusion from our beds the next morning to lives that would be forever fractured, strewn in the aftermath of an act both so senseless and so calculated that it left barely a trace of what it came to take.
….. only his bed, still perfectly made….. his closet still filled with clothes…. His car parked, abandoned, in a strange part of town…. And a search that has never ended.
May it beckon to your imagination, ever so bewitchingly.
RR
TheRuthieRose 