Finally, here’s today’s prompt (optional, as always). In “After Turning the Clocks Back,” Jennifer Moxley links present with past, using a few well-placed details to invoke both a sense of the daily “now” and a nostalgic sense of the speaker’s long-ago life. In your poem today, similarly compare your everyday present life with your past self, using specific details to conjure aspects of your past and present in the reader’s mind.
Happy writing!
Trouble
with Nostalgia is you can't touch it
Third time in as many weeks, another rejection
email blinks from the bedside table, unable to shake
the Covid habit of checking my phone seconds
after I wake up, I reach for the blue screen blinking
under the squiggles the filigree fingers of sunlight,
that reach through the crack
in our bedroom blinds, draw on the wall above the headboard.
Next to me, my love sleeps. He’s clutching precious five
minutes past
Snooze. While the wrinkles on our pillow tango
with diamonds in the beams, I smuggle my complaint
into his arm, his back and say, another rejection.
The eggshells he was once forced to walk upon,
whenever this happened before the long pandemic,
before the health scare, before this war,
have softened. They are mulch now.
He mumbles a sorry or maybe he’s asked what time
even though it’s been less than a minute since I read
the mail. And I chide him; I’m not your wall clock.
Touch, such a simple, everyday word. I lie in its
grace. Behind my closed eye-lids, the sun-kissed minutes
before we must rise to start our days, elongate like
a well-travelled tale, as if to say, why look to journals
in far off places, or the distant past,
when here, in the now, in the day to day
acceptance lives in everyday words?
Gorgeous--the love beams from your poem/bed! Perfect ending.
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