Happy Birthday, erin cecelia.
Be Brave Be Vulnerable Be resilient Be kinD
Be all that you can be
The clock ticks, clicks,
Tick click
Click tick
And spins a golden dance
Its own fair Scrambler under a glass dome.
Through generations it is passed.
Marking seconds through the eyes of child without toys on rainy Sunday afternoons
Hours through wars when our young are stationed abroad.
Marking minutes after midnight when a curfew is missed.
Through fear that not everyone is just running late.
And when the phone rings to ask if he’s home.
A mother will know in an instant that he’s never coming home again
Tick
Click
Tick
“not yet. I’ll tell him you called” Click
Tick
She wants to call 911. Click
Tick There is an emergency
She calls hospitals. Click
Police click
She lights a cigarette and circles the table
One way and then the other.
Her own fair Scramble under a Bell Jar.
It breaks with the knock on the door.
Tick
She stamps out her smoke. click
She steels herself against the world
The latch opens, Tick
The officer need not speak.
He sees in her eyes she knows what he has come to say.
He wonders if he can get away without saying it.
Can this moment of unspoken understanding be enough.
Click
“You’ll need to identify him at the hospital, ma’am”
She nods, but doesn’t break.
She grabs her coat and her keys and follows.
This is the last time she is whole.
When she returns, the dawn has cracked.
And she has cracked with it.
She is a jigsaw of pieces
Solved into one whole being.
This night has not just carved away son’s one piece.
It unstitched all the seams.
Pulled the piece from her heart,
The lines all crease deeper.
There isn’t a glue that binds them to be framed and hung on the wall.
The tears come slowly
Nothing sticks when it’s wet.
This is the day the clock has stopped not only for him,
For her too.
Every smile will be shorter
Every laugh thinner
Every joy…
there won’t be any of that.
She doesn’t scramble ‘round the kitchen
She just sits in his bed
Holding Moondoggie who felt the loss of the boy many years ago
He had given his left eye to be the boy’s faithful companion.
And when he got left behind for the last time,
He’d have given his right for one more day
Tonight they’d cry together.
Tock
10-14 400 words no edits
