The Widow's Tears

Behind me the widow sits at the corner-stall, her family awash in the sea of fate, their memories ebbing with her sighs…their solemn silhouettes caressing her grief-stricken heart, but to what avail?

Do not recount their names before her, for they but bring a wicked sorrow that would but gash away at a heart whose numbered beats have become faint and senile. Watch as her parched tears etch the arid sands below her -- carving her anguish -- jagged letters of agony...

Let the torrent of her tears cascade and the soil imbibe her sorrow, let the letters become words, for perhaps now the heavens would lend their catholic ears and listen.

She says nothing, but of course she needn't say -- everything around her has so gravely spoken.
The maroon blood stains blotch her noticeably tattered clothes; it’s a sight no less grim then the ravaged streets that surround around her. No less dire than the innominate children across from her, scavenging through carrion waste, sullying their once innocent hearts. Another sigh escapes the grip of her crippling grief, consoling briefly her heart with an ever so distant hope, reminding her that ‘His’ vital spirit still surges within her. That it is not death that encircles her but the verve of life coiled in the pangs of her suffering.

Trying her—painfully chiseling the breadth of her vision; shattering the shackles of this noxious love. Like a mother disciplining her insolent child, that perhaps beyond the tears and grief, she might listen. That she might learn.

I wipe her tears with my fleeting thoughts, still damp from life’s somber lessons. For if she has yet to learn, she has at least taught me a lesson.