The Widow She lays the wedding dress upon the bed and soothes its delicate seams with a gentle hand and fingers the laced bodice like a bird upon the snowy quilt of a winter’s dawn; she stands for hours, lost, as though in dream and stiffens suddenly and slowly puts it back. The visitors are slowly drifing back now she has risen from the solace of her bed. Although no longer do the young men dare to dream of taking her by her translucent hand and dancing out the night until the rose of dawn streaks the sky, heralded by the first bird. Now they are older suitors, stiff like a starched bird. A doctor or a clerk, hook-nosed with an arched back and it has gradually begun to dawn on her that she needs no one in her bed. Her memories hemstitched by her own deft hand; desires sewn shut, she sleeps but dare not dream. And yet she walks the trenches in some sunken dream- -like mist that turns to gas that kills each bird and here and there a half-submerged pale hand seems to point to No-Man’s-Land; forward, not back to where he, blown to wet red dust, forms a bed of blood as red as any that formed a dawn. She opens windows wide to greet the dawn and staring from the window starts to dream: Him: standing there amongst her flower bed; Awkward, young and gawky like some ungainly bird. And her fingers cannot touch across his broad back as he brushes her cheek with a teenager’s wondering hand. She gave away his clothes, but even secondhand she cannot watch a stranger wear them. Dawn taunts her with yet another day and him not back. She never awakens from this chilling dream; Her heart flutters weakly like a dying bird and no one’s here to fill the coldness in her bed. And she has made her bed and closed her grief in hand. A solitary bird upon a lonely dawn and still adream; she dreams he’s never coming back.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 12:08:03 +0000
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