April 17, 2020

I’m in a writer’s group and our writing prompt was “Together in the Solitude.” I don’t often write…whatever this is, but it was all my fingers could crank out yesterday. I thought I’d share it with you too.

I stretch my cold feet across the bed to yours
The distance only inches 
But today we’ll rise again to the same routine, the same distance from
family, friends, the normal that 
slipped away 
when we were falling asleep

I never imagined that we’d be home
All of us here, working, eating, dreaming
The days stretching on 
Threads of gold tied to the steam rise of coffee each morning
strung up to the lemon sky 
tucked under lake storm clouds by dusk

We are far from the hum of Saturdays at the market
Sundays before the throne
Tuesday mornings at the coffee shop
Thursday nights with a house full and dishes clattering 
and cars lining the edges of our field

Maybe if we could see the way hymns rise from our lips
and prayers around the table
Early morning worship 
and the pleas I make on my knees in the garden
How they’re all woven together with the body
Wherever the body is these days

With every day that passes, 
what was slips further and further into
the shadowed corners of memory
and so I stretch my cold feet across the bed to yours

A reminder that your warmth is mine to share
as we are together in this solitude.