This House – a poem by Rick Leddy

 

This empty house

This closed book

We drive around the familiar city

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Streets filled with context

Haunted cloud-filled forever horizon skies

swarming with memories

And little else

The summer wind promises storms

Swaying silhouettes dance dark

Against the dying gun metal dusk

Escaped leaves butterfly and land

Green on green against the grass

Temporary mandalas here then gone

Rearranging, changing with each gust

This home

This empty shell swirling with ghosts

Shadows waiting, time-bombs ticking

In every corner, around each turn

You pick and choose recollections

Excise bits and pieces of completed lives

Dismantle the years

And put them in boxes

Do you want this?

You ask each other

When you want it all

You want this home

To be what it can never be again

Them ambered in time

Frozen in place forever

The loved ones now scattered in piles about this house

A landscape familiar, yet unrecognizable

Now covered in jagged glass

Each step an agony of loss

Every movement quicksand

An acknowledgement of the inevitable

This silent place filled with your childhood

This vessel containing all the good and bad

This home that is all of you

And all of them

The past slowly flowing from it

Emptying into an uncertain future

This house that you have loved

And always will

Rick Leddy is a poet, cartoonist, graphic designer, author, editor, and art director. He is the author of two poetry books, “365+1”, a collection of poetry that contains 366 poems — a poem a day — for the year 2016 and “Metro Mona Lisa”, which chronicles his journeys on the Los Angeles Metro and containing a unique blend of graphics and written word. He has authored two other books: “LeBron James – King of the Game” and “American Heroes: The U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Road to Glory.” You will find him fending off imaginary enemies in the park when he isn’t writing or drawing.