Eye On Life Magazine

Make every day a beautiful day.

Eye on Life Magazine is a Lifestyle and Literary Magazine.  Enjoy articles on gardening, kitchen cooking, poetry, vintage decor, and more.

Whole in Theory

Maybe life died that day

after all

my feet froze in place

and my hands turned a grape-shade of

purple while anxiously struggling to clutch

the China teacup.

 

I wanted to stroke your face

the way curious children finger a newborn’s features

but your body was cold

and only my mind could dart from the fallow position

that callously seized

me hostage.

 

Revelers rejoiced somewhere

I know they did,

oblivious to the ache that seized my

innards.

Even ordinary

tasks like defecating in an oval hole

seemed laborious in every sense of the

word.

 

I stared for a while,

at the slight bump dressing your

otherwise delicate nose and loveliness I would never again

be honored to inhale.

Breathing in everything that made you real

while capturing a mental snapshot

to soothe

for future desperations

or occasions

I simply need my mommy.

 

Twenty-four winters have passed

since that somber time,

war’s brutality

peered its unkind eyes

and lines claimed squatter’s rights by my lips.

Now

I value days when obscurity is gracious enough to

grant a respectable distance.

Perhaps life didn’t die,  

it just became a bruised variant

of whole.

 

Cheryl Sommese

Honorable Mention, EOL Poetry Contest 2011-2012