Lined Locks

NEW

She kept all her ideas

In a plaid-printed notebook,

The colors of Easter:

            Kissed bubblegum pink

            Sprinkled baby’s eyes blue

And

A shade of green like Easter Egg Hunting in her Grandmother’s living lawn, fighting cousins for the last handful of eggs, and biting the heads off lemon-yellow, sugared-candy chicks.

And smiling.

She hid her dreams behind these colors.

She hid her thoughts behind this notebook’s

            Lined locks.

She hid her smiles behind the pages

And

Wasted her tears in the watching world—

The watching world which

Expected Halloween tears from her.

 

She kept all her hope—

            And all her parents’ hope too—

Behind the

            Lined locks

Of the Easter Journal—

Kept them inside the ribbon,

Which served as her marker:

The ribbon that was

The color of frost underneath an early-morning, lilac-laughing cloud;

The ribbon that she

Hoped to tie in her

            Real

Hair someday—

Ribbons felt too

            Synthetic

On the hospital-smelling hair she wore for now—

                                                Hopefully just for now.

 

She kept it all in that

            Plaid-printed

            Easter-colored

            Notebook:

Wrote in it every night

As she

Whispered her dreams to the listening moonlight.

 

And on the day of her death,

When they broke the

            Lined locks

            To read,

The last thing she had written

Was one single word—

The one thing she could not pretend,

The only dream she could comprehend.

On the day of her death,

The last thing she had written,

In her bluebonnet pen,

Was

“Life”.

And they all wept, but

Nobody understood—

Nobody could.

 

Reviews

[~crazy Beautiful~]

wow this one was creative, I love the title. The flow was very good, the lesson was amazing. Nice work.
Thank you for entering my contest

[Legion]

How poetically sad. Well written.

One note though: "sugared-candy checks" - did you mean "chicks"?