January 18, 2016

Summer Storm

Outside the window
two wind chimes hang.
Their wooden bamboo tubes sway gently in the breeze
clacking and playing a tuneless song
for the rotund black and white cat to hear
as he sits on my grandma’s brick wall.
He seems to be taking a deeper look
into empty space than at the garden.
Meanwhile,
the wind blows harder,
a precursor to the coming goliath.
the shadow of a summer storm approaches.


An almighty clatter
of blowing leaves
and falling rain
serenade me as I clutch
the black and purple tome,
a bruised and regal book
that has not known rest for some 57 hours.
I, the third reader, now hold it
and sit wide eyed on my sister’s creaking bed.
I am incensed, obsessed,
an uneasy feeling has dropped into my stomach,
nausea of a coming doom,
and outside the storm blows harder.

The rain drops barrage the window pane,
loud as bullets,
but drowned out by my weeping sobs.
The huddled mass that I have become
rocks back and forth
like some straight-jacket-clad mental patient.
Hot tears fall fast and I utter a verbal “Why?”.
I didn’t see it coming until it was upon me,
and suddenly I feel the stabbing pain of loss.
I won’t allow it to go further.
I can’t even turn the page.

Outside the window,
the storm has caught the chimes.
They form a hollow tune,
more sorrowful than a death knell
or funeral march.
They play the only song I hear,
the sound of a breaking heart.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Have you ever had a character in a book that you loved and believed in since the beginning do something really, really bad?  And you saw it coming only one page before he did it, so you cried and cried for twenty minutes, and then you sat there rationalizing about how maybe there was a way for him not to actually be doing something bad, like a secret plot where he’s still good?  And you accept it and then turn the page, knowing he’s still good, and read the terrible bad-but-good deed, and the cry for twenty more minutes?  Yeah.  That was my experience of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  This is a poem about that.

My rationalization was totally vindicated, by the way…

My poems about Deathly Hallows, however, shall never see the light of day…

1 comment:

  1. That part was the first (but not the last) time I jumped up and yelled a swear word about shattering events in a work of fiction.

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