Saturday 4 October 2014

The Watch

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.

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