I gather trinkets now. Indulgences. Now, at last, when my life grows late.
A silver ring like a fox; earrings like silver roses – though why I need them I don’t know, knowing we can take nothing with us. Nothing, perhaps, except our memories.
Will you remember me? Now, I know you do; but always?
‘Shall we meet again?’ I asked the seer, soon after you died. He looked, it seemed, into some kind of space, at once inner and cosmic. After a few minutes, said, ‘Nothing surer.’ Then, after another pause, ‘But not in this time.’
Well, duh, I didn’t want to encounter you next as a new infant and I an old lady!
Then again, I want always to encounter you. Whichever way you come, whatever body you’re dressed in.
There is no body you inhabit now. (Well, not as far as I know.) There is the one I remember … in which to dress your soul … your soul which I also remember.
The trinkets are simply symbols. I wish they might also be signals. Do you receive them, in the ether somewhere?
Symbols. Signals. Sigils?
I fill them full of intent.
Exploring the zuihitsu form: 'following the brush' – or the movement of the imagined brush.
Sharing with Poets and Storytellers United, for Friday Writings #237: Favourites Revisited, in which I invite participants to identify a favourite prompt and write a new piece inspired by it. When I came to do that for myself, I discovered that there is no particular subject I prefer, but that I most like prompts to which I am inclined to respond using form, particularly some form I feel I'm not adept with and need to explore. One of my current favourite forms to fit that bill is a style of prose poetry called the zuihitsu. I'm not sure I'm even getting it right – but making the attempt is one of my poetic pleasures.