Death of a Beloved- Maya

Alone in the house

for a week,

I thought about it.

What if this were

my permanent condition?

Not a little break, a respite,

a rare chance for solitude,

but the way, the state of being,

the everyday condition.

Finding the house locked up

every day when

I get home from work.

No one to cook for.

The handyman chores hired out

or left undone.

 

It is not a question

of maybe,

but rather one of when.

And who.

 

For one of us

will face this.

Jane Kenyon knew it. 

She wrote –

One day it will be otherwise -

And it was,

for her and Donald Hall,

she succumbing to leukemia,

and he left to write

his poems alone.

 

I loved this week,

the house quiet and all mine.

No struggling over who

gets to use the iMac now.

Cooking and eating

what I wanted

when I wanted it.

Peaceful late afternoons

in the hammock.

 

But always, always,

lurking somewhere

in my mind, the knowledge

that what is treasured now

could be despised later.

 

The death of a beloved,

a ghost of the future

haunting the house.

Maya, 8/29/09, Prompt: Death of a Beloved

A Wellspring of Spirit - JohnD

Prompt: A Wellspring of Spirit 08/22/09

We were down thirty-five to seven and Randy kept saying “Let’s go. We’ve got a chance.”

Let’s go? I laughed at the absurdity.

“The Hell with it!” he said finally. “You guys have given up. I’ll run it alone. I don’t need any of you."

I was offended. I think we all were. We were trying, but we were realistic, too. Randy was in la-la land. It seemed we were all in agreement: if he wanted to run it alone, let him. At the snap of the ball, we braced ourselves temporarily for the Mustangs' charge, but then, with very little fight, we let them slip through.

With his right arm, Randy tucked the ball tight into his body. I guess the Mustangs couldn’t see the ball. If he had it, of course, we would be protecting him, but we weren’t. They looked elsewhere, but nobody else was running or doing much of anything Then it was too late. Randy had momentum and they didn’t. He flowed through their defenses like water over stones.

Thirty-five, fourteen and we were back on the field in four minutes. Randy tried to get us pumped up again. Nothing! We were impressed, sure, but one lucky run wasn’t going to win the game. Now, the Mustangs were ready for him. He wouldn’t fool them again. He didn’t. He ran. Again, we did next to nothing for him. They were on him like a pack of wolves. And though they brutalized him, they didn’t bring him crashing to the ground. It was more like they crushed him from all sides. Out from the middle of that, he twisted and flipped around, hitting the ground running. He got hit again and again, but he harnessed the impact of each hit and catapulted himself forward to a fierce and motivational touch down. Thirty-five, twenty-one.

After that, we were all believers. We drove, rushed, fought, fought, and fought. We lost: thirty-five, twenty-eight. But we were a wellspring of spirit. The crowd went wild. I mean wild, absolutely wild. And they were mostly Mustang fans, on their own field. I think we gave a lot of people the show of their lives. Later, I learned that folks heard the cheering from that field almost two miles away. It was the greatest loss ever. I’m proud that I was a part of that.

“Let’s go! We’ve got a chance.” Randy was right about that after all.