It's Still Life

It is very hard to write this way, beginning things backward…
“The Torrents of Spring” (1926)- Ernest Hemingway

Life, Death, and That Flash Before Your Eyes

From a pram to this hearse. This dark.
To wear the dark. This simple nothingness.

It’s fitting funeral weather.
Weather is a funeral’s skin.

Rain.
Mud sucks.

It’s a brute sky,
and the sun is broken.

But I didn’t waste my years – too late
for a rewrite. Hindsight.

I trespass on sentences. My last words.
Are there still vowels in my mouth?

My grandchildren are a taste of moonlight.
They’re a reflection. The sun. A rip of light.

Two sons are mine from another woman.
It is no small thing, this love for them.

A terrible gloom when a girl’s father dies.
Grief is a terrible primary colour.

Wed. I wanted the whole of him.
Breathless. He was on my tongue.

But how do they fly, I asked.
They’re weightless, he said.

The Lord is my shepherd, I said.
Confirmation is always white

as snow as mountain tops as cotton socks.
As plimsolls. Belly white. Toothpaste.

The smell of salt. Scent of isopropyl.
Lavender. Soap. And ether. Ether.

Breath held in this vast swing of sky.
Ready. To begin. I begin.

The dark. To wear the dark. To be
the dark in this simple nothingness.

written to prompts: dVerse One True “Hemingway” Sentence” and Miz Quickly’s Big One. Image is micro-abstract of Hieronymus Bosch’s signature on his painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. Shared with @Experimentsinfc #APoemADay on Twitter   ©Misky 2021