Purposeful and Heartfelt

Before I shunned The straight and narrow As something lacking poetry An airless prison Devoid of substance And the space to just be To breathe But if you listen hard enough You will hear the nightingale’s song And the air will burst in new color Words will fall and tumble around you Opening your heart No matter what the circumstances Or the constraints you perceive Reach out, take hold, and see beyond Give birth to a new day

This poem came to me on a bus at a moment I wouldn’t have predicted a lot of positivity. Chicago was slammed with the first real blizzard of the year which I hadn’t heard was coming. I needed to pick up something downtown by a certain time and left with hours to spare.

I got on the bus easily enough, and settled in for the ride. Soon though, it became apparent that even with more than two extra hours to get there it wasn’t going to happen. After 25 minutes we’d gone eight stops and I had 32 left to go.

I waited another half hour before accepting my fate and finally got off. It took almost an hour and a half before I managed to board a bus that would return me home, and cold and wet, with an earache and sore throat I sat miserably, huddled by a window.

But as I thawed, a moment of calm came and though my eyes were closed and I was drifting off, I became determined to take advantage of whatever period of peacefulness came. Even though I wasn’t as clear headed as I might otherwise hope for, I managed to create this poem which may not be my most skillfully rendered one, but which I wanted to share anyway as it marks a lesson that I learned.

This is to take advantage of even the briefest moments of wonder that can come from even simply the absence of a negative state or a time when negativity would seem to be perfectly reasonable under the circumstances. These are the moments when life is lived, when creativity comes calling, when you perceive light instead of darkness and they shouldn’t be wasted.

Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had her poetry featured in several anthologies including Untimely Frost. Her fiction has been published in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others. Her collection of poetry, Disguised I Breathe, In Love I Hold, can be found here on Amazon.

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You can also find links to all of the articles, stories, fiction and poetry I publish on Medium here. Thanks for reading and for supporting Mental Gecko!