Frail

The ivy doesn’t look too well and I wonder if I have watered it too much or too little?   Its leaves are soft fading and curling.   It looked healthy before as did you. I wonder if my efforts to nurture have been in vain and that somehow I have missed the point, the point of survival.  Is survival to merely exist or to live life to the full or to just survive whatever the cost?  What worth is our history if we just die, the memory of us diminishing across generations, words on a headstone, nothing more.

You are frail now my love, yet I don’t understand how a sixteen stone man can be described as frail – it just doesn’t correlate.   Frail to me is a stick-thin person teetering on the edge of life and death.   Rest is rust they say as if somehow these words of wisdom will raise you like Lazarus from your bed, strengthen your atrophied muscles, reactivate your mind.

I feed you thickened fluids from your sip cup and you drink with a want.  I wonder if you thirst too much or there is just never enough.  Is this your way of hanging onto life or do fluids bring comfort?  You smile at me and grab at the cup sipping on blackcurrant goo.  I love you so much you know – I will quench your thirst forever.

How the wind rages,

precipitating the storm,

winter is coming.

Anna :o]

Shared with the good folk at Poets United, hosted by the lovely Mary - cheers Mary!

Also shared with the good folk at Real Toads, hosted by Vivian.  Cheers coming to you too Vivian!

Owl

“And yesterday the bird of night did sit

Even at noon-day upon the marketplace,

Hooting and shrieking.  When these prodigies

Do so conjointly meet, let not men say,

“These are their reasons.  They are natural.”

For I believe they are portentous things

Unto the climate that they point upon.”

(Julius Caesar, Shakespeare.)

I’m not one prone to superstition, I’m not.  I defiantly walk under ladders, step on cracks in the pavement and chatter whilst walking under a *monkey puzzle.  If I break a mirror and cut myself clearing the fragments, that is carelessness.  I do not fear the next seven years. 

But this is different.  He (owl) has stood sentry outside my window for nigh on two days now, staring at me, unblinking.  He appears to need neither nourishment nor sleep, his only need seeming that of me.

Winter is here and I find myself fading as if day into night.  And he watches.  He watches.  He watches…

Night yawns at sunrise and I welcome this new day –

I  live!   I  live! 

Snow falls gently from the heavens,

casting itself at my window,

blankets the earth in its white finery,

offers me strange comfort.

Still, there is a sense of foreboding, a hollowness,

and owl, he watches, he watches. 

I fear his vigilance and wonder if I shall live to see the thaw…

Oh that he would leave me alone…

Anna :o]  

*During my early childhood I learnt of the superstition of talking whilst walking beneath the branches of a monkey puzzle tree - it was believed that bad luck would occur or we might lose something and in some cases grow a monkey's tail!

Sumana at Poets United has us writing of The Owl and above is my offering.  Cheers for the inspiration Sumana!

  

Image:  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Author:  Richard Fisher