Untouched memories By Amber Rose

I dove by the old house

That pavement still curving its way to the door

And I stopped and looked at the old maple tree

The one that my father once talked of turning into a fort

When it’s leafs finally fell my brother and I would fish them from the pond

The smell of flowers each summer when my mom would landscape

I could almost feel the breeze as I remembered watching her while I swung

And I imagined myself going inside

Everything the same as it were before, untouched like a photograph

The old blue couch in the living room that only got used for holidays

Marks in the kitchen wall displaying our heights

Hot pink and lime green walls still brightening my bedroom

A fireplace where we huddle around each winter

Running my fingers through the shag carpet

Laughing about how mad my father got trying to put it in

Turning and seeing the dent in the wallpaper from when he threw his toolbox

A cold draft rattles through the house

The noise I once found frightening felt comforting

Walking down the narrow hallway after all these years

Everything feels as it should yet again

The sun inside my chest as the feeling of home drowns my sorrows

And in that very moment a family pulls into the driveway

They walk together up the curvy walkway

And into that cozy small house

That had all once been mine

 

Poem of the Day: The Shadow on the Stone

BY THOMAS HARDY

I went by the Druid stone

   That broods in the garden white and lone,  

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows  

   That at some moments fall thereon

   From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,  

   And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders  

   Threw there when she was gardening.

      I thought her behind my back,

   Yea, her I long had learned to lack,

And I said: 'I am sure you are standing behind me,  

   Though how do you get into this old track?'  

   And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf  

   As a sad response; and to keep down grief

I would not turn my head to discover

   That there was nothing in my belief.

      Yet I wanted to look and see

   That nobody stood at the back of me;

But I thought once more: 'Nay, I'll not unvision  

   A shape which, somehow, there may be.'  

   So I went on softly from the glade,

   And left her behind me throwing her shade,  

As she were indeed an apparition—

   My head unturned lest my dream should fade.