It's Still Life

All year that limb hung there as if baffled by gravity’s indecision, and sometime between dark and daylight, it lost its balance, fell from the sky, and plunged to the earth.

White beechwood bark peeling and curling back onto itself, lichen-poxed, and laying in the mud-soaked grass like a withered long bone.

It’s what my grandmother called a widow’s stick. That’s when something is gone, but it leaves a bit of itself behind just to remind you that it’s gone. It’s good for poking at a dying embers, she said.

But I like to think that existence has its own reason for being.

Inspired by Six Sentence Story. Imagery and prose/poems ©Misky 2023.