Number Three

Delivering laundry, I pause at the door

of your room, survey this soft stuff of life:

a week’s worth of clothes on the floor,

dresser candy-littered with hairbands,

loom bracelets, a jewelry stand.

Your shelves full with trip souvenirs,

cute animal books, silk-flower fairies

forlorn in fine dust. On your desk,

a sheet of paper covered in schoolgirl’s best

writing: lyrics of a boy-band song. Against the wall,

the fashion doll, wigless, in her Barbie-house bed;

her friends in a box (farewells left unsaid?).

I glance up at the skylight, festooned with scarves

and framed by December frost. I sigh for all

that is gained and lost in a year’s time.

You haven’t asked for toys this Christmas.

 

Inspired by Red Wolf Poems’ We Wordle 32. With the words fly, dust, song, puff, toy, frost, soft, fairies, lost, life, door, the poem pretty well wrote itself.