Like Creeping Charlie

She had lived her life tidily

Never shifting from the parental molding

Careful not to stretch too far beyond the brink.

Slowly the stiffening had entered somewhere

Inwardly she had shifted into pain and then

Found a constant companion in grief

When had the happiness melted away?

Like the ice on the old pond up over the back pasture.

One day she sat by a stream and let the cold water

Sift against her toes, cool and clean and new

And realized that she had stopped feeling

Had butted the flow of life inside of herself

Until she no longer knew who she was.

Why had  she let the mold lie in her chest like stone

Encased in a hardness that did not allow tears?

Why had she let their opinions matter when her own heart

Had words beyond description and rays stronger than the sun?

She took the hand of her tiny boy and walked home

With a new awareness, a new hope

She would not let them stifle her any more

It was her life and her heart and she gave her spirit

Back to herself.

   

Inside the house the sun entered through the rear kitchen window

She peered out at the lawn rippled in tufts of incessant weed

It was like looking into the window of her soul

She saw the creeping Charlie that had spread all the way to the fence.

She walked out to the tool shed and took the hoe from the rack

With renewed strength she hoed all that creeping Charlie

Pulled and hacked and ripped and cut until there was not a shred of it

Left behind.

cailin raine