It felt like she was falling downstairs made of mountains
Unaware we had hung onto every cliff of her words
Her sentences blurred between spaces
Where delusion and reality
could never really meet and form into a complete thought
Out in the open with the doctors
hoping we could reach her where the medicines didn’t
We found that we came for her only to find
she had departed long before we arrived
and in a way, the doctors and nurses couldn’t describe
Now rocking in her chair the glare from her glossy eyes
appeared to make some type of contact
with a vision that had a mission that was only known to her
If only she could sit still long enough
maybe she would see it, for all of us to see
Chapped lips with a long distance droll
oozing out of then made her words slide
down sentences unsure as to where they went,
hair not even slightly brushed like her teeth
this sight of a woman once so well kept
made it even harder for us to keep our mind right
not knowing what to feel angry upset or just depressed
sitting still where time rushed by us
where we were tortured by life’s lie
that everything was going to be alright
Alerted that our time was up we left her in her chair
Grinning than sobbing, celebrating holidays
than even howling in her own world
that left us all out of it and nowhere near seeing her
other than what was just in front of us
which was an illness filled with blissful despair
*This work was first published in The Scarlet Leaf Review
Author Bio:
Uzomah has a way of capturing a scene and the feelings that allow you to follow and flow within the realms of her poetics as you read each line filled with metaphors. Her placement of ideas and images leaves you dangling all the way throughout the poem, line by line with trauma, pain joy or a mixture of both that reveals some type of solitude. She surprises you in end with something she does not even may mean to say at all, that we all might be feeling, and had not felt until reading one of her poems.