National Poetry Month--Day 23--Free Verse--Derelict

This is a free verse kinda day. So here it goes:

Derelict

Long before the phage silence scoured the streets 

And set fear among them like ravening wolves,

She was a crumbling tower, 

A derelict no one felt to know.
The clock ticked for her in a voice
Most final, most inescapable.
Tick. Tick. Tick.

In her was no need cached

Just a cardboard mock-up 

Long relegated to the attic until such time 

As her family could no longer avoid

Including it in the general decorating scheme.

They had their own lives, and a million replacements

For what she should have been to them.

And always that neatly wrapped explanation

For why they didn't need her,

Dressed in words that said they did.
Tick. Tick. Tick.

Well there was this: She needed them.

She needed to be the person she was designed to be.

Not some lame explanation why she should

Feel happy that they didn't.

She needed a place to open a window in their lives

A massive space full of light, 

With room for green growing things; 

For wind sifting the fields of ripening grain; 

Through pine boughs soughing, 

Tipping green glass waves with lacy froth. 

She needed that space to breathe in them.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

No Admittance! read the sign on their door.

They cared not to open it and see her standing there.

She disturbed their proscribed little fastnesses.

"You could have come in," they said,

Artfully forgetting the sign,

Determined to shrug off any unwanted responsibility.

"You could try shoehorning yourself in."

But they didn't really mean it.

For she was the sand in their shells,

Reminding them what they weren't and what they were.

"You're wrong!" they said.

But how would they know, 

Never bothering to look inside her?

They weren't the only ones.

Inertia claimed the little old cardboard construct.

She stood petrified by their myriad proofs

And allowed those harbingers to eat away at her.
Tick. Tick. Tick.

Regret filled the chinks and eked 

From the cracks in her soul. 

Exhausted at having to muscle her way in,

She washed her hands of it all,

Not content, but at sea, not knowing

What to do, or how.

At times it all became too ponderous

And the sleeper awoke from her crouch,

Shrugged off the stifling, obscuring blanket.

She unfolded her wings and, for one fleeting moment

Rose screaming, with wind filling her pinions and feathers,

A memory of what her potential had promised.

She'd give those wings a shake and a flutter.

Then, catching sight of their disbelief and annoyance,

Sank back into that fetal crouch

In the face of their fiery determination

To keep her locked away 

Where she could do no harm.
Tick. Tick.

The wreck of a woman watched life happen

For and to those others.

The dusky silence flayed her wide open

Revealing the entrails of her character

Once covered in a smooth layer of obfuscating skin.

Did she like what lay there glistening in baleful scorn?

No. She had calcified into a hard, unyielding shell. 
Tick. Tick. Tick.

Her dreams whispered mortality through

The long watches of the night.

Measuring her hours with a short ruler.

She lay there watching 

As one by one, the moorings of her existence

Were tossed away

Setting her adrift.
Tick.

No crowds gathered to wave her off.

Just a seabird or two seeking tidbits

On the fishy breeze.

She stood in the boat, trying to catch

One last sight of the land,

One last gossamer thread

Connecting her to life.

It snapped, drifting in the sudden mist, 

Glinting before it, too, fell away.

Foggy billows clouded her life

Concealing what lay ahead.

She drifted in a dream state fugue

Memories sparking, then drifting away.

They, the people of her past

Had already forgotten her,

Their excuses ready to hand.

In reality, they had been forgetting

From their first meeting.

No past. A future yet veiled in mist.

Fear took her, clutching at her scrawny throat

Setting her antique heart skittering.

She'd held no value in life.

What of death?

What use broken fragments, sharp edged

And jagged?

What use a life spent in the gutter,

Cast aside, battered, and bruised,

Self-doubt beating at her, 

Sapping her will to carry on,

Her potential latent and useless?

A callused hand emerged from the fog

It claimed her time-clawed hand 

And drew her from her tears, 

From the wreckage of lost dreams

The mist vanished in the face of

Pure coruscating light,

Trailing from a being so white 

She could not see His face at first

He brought her closer, 

Into arms strong enough to banish

All her trappings of anguish.

He held her there, 

The light fluttering and whirling about them,

Filling her with a love so potent 

All wounds fell away.

His eyes. 

Oh the eyes which 'saw' her

Knew her every nook and cranny

Every hope and dream and bit

Of lost understanding.

She waited while He filled her

With the fact of His unimaginable love

"You are not broken, little handmaid.

Only waiting."

At last! 

Out of the crouch she burst,

Wings of light unfurling in the breeze

Sloughing away the obscuring wrinkles and spots

He wiped the tears from smoothed cheeks

And took her face in his 

Yet-wounded hands.

His eyes full of infinite caring,

Knowing all she was and wasn't 

And hadn't managed to become,

He said with incredible tenderness

And ultimate truth,

"How I love you."

Then she awoke.

©2020 by H. Linn Murphy