[Lady Sidhe]

(Reposted from the "Well?" thread...)


Ok, first poem...I had to write a sonnet for a poetry class, so it was the first sonnet I ever wrote...and very concrete, which I wasn't accustomed to, which was why I was so tickled when it got published...

I tried to bring across the idea of the lonliness of someone who who has survived her partner of many years, and has been somewhat "forgotten" by her children, and yet still dresses up in the hope that someone may visit her.

I wrote it because I remember when a friend and I once visited a nursing home on a whim, and the lonliness on the faces of all those old people whose children had abandoned them to an institution just broke my heart. I and a friend sat and talked to a group of old folks all day, just to give them some company...the stories they told about their lives...the things they'd seen and done...it was amazing, and their children didn't know the living history they were missing by ignoring their relatives. All in all, it was a fascinating day, but it made me so sad I never went back...this poem is one poem I think that maybe I DID write, subconsciously, for other people...a memorial to all those old people who were abandoned in that nursing home.

A SONNET IN FUTILITY

In an ancient, chipped, brown rocking chair
The old woman sits in her very best;
She sits and rocks, and rocks and stares
At the winter-abandoned paper nest
Underneath her front-porch eaves.
Like the wasps, her own have flown...
Around the nest, the windy leaves
Swirl, as she sits poised beside the phone.
No more busy buzzing noise
Of insect nest or active house
She rocks and thinks with downcast eyes
Of long-gone children, long-dead spouse.
But still, she peers from her window-nest,
Rocking, in her very best.


Sidhe