The Drifted Ladder: A Spring Poem About What Comes Back

Good memories bloom with a smile

under the sunshine.

They are beauty in the petals

but they fall by the wind: the gust of my trauma,

Bonding me to the path

along the green grass.

Under the shoes of strangers

am I

pressed.

~

I blink; then the sun hides behind the cloud of my mind,

Returning me

My return,

it was gelid;

The relationship was bad,

Everything that I wore

you controlled.

~

Alone, I float in the midst of the crowd,

fading into my green puffer

as the shadows claim their entry in the spring.

It is still cold

and it still rains.

My past was where the shadows went

when the light halts.

~

A sullen moon,

My face becomes.

I watch the shadows enter

where the light once gathered.

Every meal that I cooked

represented something that he took:

My time, my mind, my meals, my plea for him to be kind.

~

Locked in a house

until I broke out;

Trying to find solace

under the blossom tree.

Even though the sun was peeking through

and the sky was a painted, drifted ladder

that I couldn’t reach,

Pinned by the weight of the present heat.

~

The blossoms brought the light,

but as the light hides

black shadows slip into me.