A Poem a Day (630): NaPoWriMo Day 3 - Night shift

 

NaPoWriMo Day 3

The prompt: we’d like to challenge you to write a surreal prose poem. 

Night shift 

In a breath of night, the delicate marigold crumbles into starlight, reborn in the webbing, the ice caught in a glance of the echo of the being at the end of the world. He strides in sentience, his night shift, the distant roots of the underworld beneath his feet shaken, turned, upended, the sand sinking, seeking an escape.

 

A shadow strikes the wall and we are still, our breath suspended in our mouths, tasting dust. In front of our faces, the wisp of curtain flickers. We stay silent. So loud it needs to be pierced. My toes are blocks of ice. I am chill. My bones ache in the draft evicted from the struck open window.

 

But here, in this space, he walks. Like a tide opening the shadows, the despair, the darkness of his being seeping into all the myriad cracks and spaces, seeking to prise them open and bleed inside.

 

We are as we were, still as the wall. In a second the one true candle will flicker out and we will be trapped, like spiders, never to be seen again.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 3, 2024