Blink Again!

This is a poem I wrote over the summer while my family was in Uganda. Not that this poem has anything to do with Uganda, it's just that I got almost zero response from it while my family is usually the only one to give me feedback. But I kept on feeling like there was something to it, so I took it in to my poetry friend and he really liked it, gave me some advice, and here I am reposting it after my edits. I think it's turned out pretty nicely. It's a little long, so I didn't post it with any other revisions. Enjoy!

A Story of Blinking

-inspired by a painting by my sister Madelene

After the home had grown

too old for the children,

the youngest of four returned to see how small

her room had become.

The bed lay tucked-in around the shadows.

The lamps were lost

in hazy sleep.

The stuffed animals watched

the intricacy of the wallpaper

not recognizing her

enough to turn their heads.

The curtains, drawn and faded,

could have belonged in a doll house.

Perhaps that’s what it had been.

A fairytale

like the ones that had leapt from the pages

into the midnight

beyond her attic windows,

the highest tower of her house.

Now the books slumped

against the scarce selection

on the bookshelf,

the memories she read too many times,

and some she never read.

She flips past the green

hardcover of one, the best one,

and remembers the small town beginning,

then return with elixir at the end.

In between, there was only an anxious tug

onward to the next page.

She herself is lost in that middle.

Her art hangs scattered on the walls,

acrylic paintings and oiled emotions

she forgot to take with her:

a hidden garden and an orchard.

She can smell the lavender perfume

and the maturing pear ready to plunge

down to a grounded world

within the dried paint.

A pencil sketch of her father reading,

an unframed canvas of her mother playing

the cello. The girl listens downstairs;

it is her favorite melody.

She hears the call to return

behind the varnished background

inside the painting.

And finally she discovers the last one, a small canvas

smeared with dusk

and words scratched into the powdered clouds

like faint stars:

Once upon a time in a far

away place

he climbed to the highest 

and she waited for him–

and the moral of the story is

you blink your eyes like maybe

I’ll disappear like a frog princess

if you blink fast enough–

and they lived happily ever

after

She closes her eyes and remembers herself

as she was when she filled the room,

flitting from moment to moment like a hummingbird,

gathering stories from snapdragons.

Her eyes reopen to a chalked sky. She leaves,

wishing it would rain, and descends

stairs that are steeper going down.