Ode
The gratitude of monotony
There is a kind of quiet that arrives not as absence, but as repetition. It lives in the turning of a kettle that has been turned a thousand times before, in the folding of laundry that will be unfolded and folded again, in the same light falling across the same floor at nearly the same hour each day. At first, the mind mistakes it for nothingness. It calls it small. It calls it unimportant. It looks for escape in novelty, in interruption, in anything that breaks the soft sameness. But the longer one stays with it, the more it begins to speak. The monotony of life is not empty. It is steady. It is a kind of breathing you only notice when you stop trying to outrun it. There is gratitude hidden in it, not loud or triumphant, but patient as stone warmed by sun. The body learns the map of its own days: wake, wash, work, rest. Love returns not as spectacle but as habit—offered in meals prepared without announcement, in doors held open, in the remembering of small needs before they are spoken. Even sorrow, when it comes, finds itself held by routine. It does not vanish, but it is carried. The same hands that stir soup also learn how to endure. And somewhere in that repetition, a strange mercy forms. Not everything must be new to be meaningful. Not everything must surprise to be sacred. The day that looks like yesterday is not lesser for it; it is proof that life continues to insist on itself, quietly, faithfully, without applause. Gratitude does not always arrive like a revelation. Sometimes it arrives like brushing your teeth again, like washing the same cup, like noticing that you are still here, still living inside the ordinary glow of another unchanged morning and finding, unexpectedly, that this is enough.
By Taylor Ward5 months ago in Poets
When the room breathes
The hallway clock had swallowed its own tongue and still she waited beneath it, hands folded like funeral gloves, watching the wallpaper breathe. There was a woman in the third room upstairs who embroidered names into handkerchiefs for children who had not yet died. Every stitch a prophecy. Every thread pulled tight enough to sing. At dusk, the doctor came carrying violets dark as bruises beneath the frost. He spoke softly to the floorboards as if the house itself were feverish. As if grief could catch. The mother in the kitchen boiled peaches to ruin. Sugar burned black at the bottom of the pot. No one mentioned the smell. No one mentioned the small pair of shoes still drying beside the stove since April. Outside, the crows dragged evening across the fields in long ribbons of ink. A horse stood unmoving near the fence line, its ribs opening and closing like the bellows of an organ. And somewhere upstairs a child laughed. Not loudly. Not alive either. The sound traveled through the wallpaper first, then through the teeth of the women listening below. One crossed herself. One dropped her spoon into the sink and watched it disappear beneath dishwater as though the house were swallowing silver now. The doctor climbed the stairs without a lamp. Step. Step. Step. The boards answered him by name. In the room at the end of the corridor the curtains swelled inward though the windows had long been nailed shut. Moonlight rested on the bed like water over a drowned thing. There sat the child. Small hands folded neatly. Sunday collar buttoned to the throat. Eyes carrying the color of storm clouds before they split open over wheat. “You took too long,” the child said. The doctor removed his hat. Downstairs, the peaches continued burning. The smell filled every room. Sweetness and rot together. The sort of scent that clings to mourning clothes for years after the funeral. The mother finally climbed the stairs then, slowly, as though each step demanded a confession. When she reached the doorway she did not scream. That is what made the house unbearable. Not terror. Recognition. She crossed the room and touched the child’s cheek. Cold as porcelain left in winter rain. The child leaned into her palm with the hunger of something buried too young. Outside, the crows fell silent. Inside, the wallpaper continued breathing. And by morning the house had forgotten every name inside it except hers.
By Taylor Ward5 months ago in Poets
Fódla na hÉireann
Introduction This is my eleventh piece inspired by Justine G. Cappelli's beautiful and inspirational artwork. This is a Glosa inspired by the artwork rather than the actual legend, but taking in elements from Justine's story of the legend that inspired the painting.
By Mike Singleton 💜 Mikeydred 5 months ago in Poets
