Free Verse
What we still have
The love we had for those short years, most people won’t get in a lifetime. There’s an emptiness now, lingering beneath my happiness, quiet, the way a bitterness tastes sweet, only to us. I catch myself reaching for you, my hand going to an empty side of the bed, or lighting a candle at church, in a life, wide and unfamiliar. My kids are getting older on the years I still get to have, and they might think I’m sad because you’re gone, but I feel you in all of them— in the shape of a nose, in a curve of a smile, a stubbornness I used to fight in you and now just call their father’s. I don't cry the way I used to. It's smaller than that— it's setting the table for one less plate it's your song in the car, it’s the number five showing up in obscure places, it’s old photographs still on the shelf. Only a few find that kind of love, amid the ordinary noise of years. Others spend their whole lives looking but it never comes. A negative space in my soul, now a second room in the house of me — door always slightly open, light from all the joy I’ve built since, still finding its way in, but even on the good days, or the settled ones, I am never standing in a house that’s fully lit.
By tatiana vitas2 months ago in Poets
The Hunt in the Forest
In love with the passion of it in another perspective —The Hunt in the Forest moves her in a weird way. Stencil like flushing of the strength in weakness peely wallpaper adorn the wall, youth picks at its corners —curious a child who knows only comfort, to young to know what's behind each tree so I tell her love . She picks away more to see a blank wall stare back then enters with nary a peep or chirp of birds, no dogs, horses or men a foot in tights, no patterned trees. It starts with emptiness, I say. Fragile as the hummingbird cupped tightly in her desquamating hands peeling back the layers.
By Gerry Thibeault2 months ago in Poets
"right". Top Story - September 2026.
The silence that followed me here leaks into every pore of my being. Magnifying like tiny particles that grew wings and decided they want to be more then a spec of dust. How was I to know that today would be eerie after the noise in my dream that tried to make things clear in the most symbolic of ways. Was it clear enough to pass the message from subconscious to conscious?
By Tanya Leij2 months ago in Poets
