The Light Within

I’ve known your beauty for forty years.

Light flickered to your eyes

as you gave a girl a doll dressed

in handmade fire-green clothes.

Chuckles cascaded from the child,

gleeful notes wavering in a breeze.

Heartfelt thanks echoed in the

sweet chirps soaked with joy.

A back brace knotted your breath.

Moans never fled the lips

as a trapped nerve crippled.

A walking aid steadied your frame.

Clouds scattered, shrouding the moon.

Pain ran amok through limbs

while the autumn sleet pelted to ground.

Numbness plagued your right foot,

toes blackened and oozed.

Eyesores were surgically removed.

But your face remained fresh,

radiant in the wake of the white sun.

In the dimming hours a smile lingered,

even as the ache wedged itself,

jagged in the flesh.

My heart stopped when you tripped,

falling onto the edge of a table.

A pink slipper slipped under the Persian rug.

December’s shadows slid over the naked earth.

Two weeks you lay rigid, spent,

cocooned in sterile linen.

A padded patch covered an eye.

When you woke, your vision curdled.

A bloody tear fell as the surgeon

prised open the sore socket.

A glass blue eye took the shock from your face.

Yet under the strains of life,

your inner light never waned,

a beacon in a bleak eclipse in time.

Spools of love mesh the trials

that try to rob and bind you.

Your voice has opted out of the grey,

finding shelter in the locket of the soul.

It speaks through the touch,

broad with bliss, never severe or scolding.

A wheelchair now carries your form.

Frail hands in black leather gloves

work metal hoops inside the wheels.

Palms bear witness to the past mileage,

calluses cling steadfastly to life’s shifts.

One eye weeps on your 90th birthday,

it focuses well-wishers bestowing gifts

with tender smiles glossed with love.

You mouth the words, ‘Thank you.’

Soft wrinkles sprinkled with powder

highlight an iridescent age.

On the kitchen window ledge,

crocuses bloom in the gaze of the sun.

Maroula Blades was awarded the runner's up prize for the GC Chapbook Contest 2008. She will be the featured poet in the December's erbacce magazine. She has received several awards. Her poems and short stories have also been published in anthologies. In Germany, Cornelsen Verlag, TAZ and Verbrecher Verlag have published her work.