The Fall from an Almost Empty Nest

(Here)
            "And now for something completely different..."  ~Monty Python

Gravity seems weak, but weaker still here--
     is his grip.  I'm free-falling toward the stars.

     Minutes hail from the rails of the clock face,
     while my boys find time to hand out blue cigars.

     The air? It is thin enough to drink here,
     where the horizon falls away to give me view.
     My girls stop playing for a moment, or a decade,
     to pen an honest analytical review.

     The atmosphere gulps in another year here,
     while paper dolls are decomposing in the lawn.

     I write in crayon on the moon I find eclipsed here,
then fall to watch the majesty of dawn.

~Mari Nichols Haining 

        It's another One Shot Wednesday.

her first untimely death

her first untimely death
   (Or: A teenager mourns a death)
 
She couldn't have known it was Childhood's last night.
So she stood on the wet grass and sang to the evening
as though it was any other.

She should have realized when she noticed,
in grown-up thoughts,
the stars arcing above her had shifted
and were marking time like the hands of a clock.

Then somewhere far away a boy died
and the moon winked a minute.
She could not have known she was waiting for a shooting star
to note the second on the asphalt sky.

In ten hours, the phone will ring.
She will step outside her body without effort. To watch,
because events like those need historians.

Detached, she'll consider it theatrical.
And when she falls to the ground
she'll wonder if the wail filling the room and straining against the walls
really comes from her.

Somewhere, innocence just isn't anymore.
It will be too late for her to know
she's wishing she were outside, singing to the stars again.
Oblivious to the clock.

~Mari Nichols Haining

This is my contribution to One Shot Wednesday - a poetic flash mob. Go check it out!