My Creative Writing Tutor set us homework . We had to imagine an item of jewellery, and using our term’s theme of light and dark, write a piece about the impact the object has. This is what I wrote.
Contained now within a small box
the remains of all her hopes and dreams
for what might have been, but now will not.
She reads again “To Rupert with all my love Florence”
and the tears roll down her face
dashing asunder her classless decorum.
The crack that cuts across the glass
a wound bleeding time till time ceased
Life on hold amidst the unseen unimagined horrors
unleashed by endless bombings by the Hun.
Amidst those squelching, mud sodden, rat ridden tunnels
the sudden smell of new mown hay
across fields yet to bloom their blood red poppies of remembrance
the colourless phosgene green clouds
seeping silently like water into paper
soaking into every nook and cranny, every pleat and fold
finding every uncovered nose and mouth.
The acid scars and blisters skin
the lungs gasp and rasp
till finally the heart stops
just like his watch
at 11.15.
.
© Sheila Ash, 2014.