Home Vigil

by Thomas Redoubt

Image credit: Tim Umphreys on Unsplash

The hilltop house of dreams

unrealized during his

illness-shortened lifetime

vacantly withstood the winds blowing

above the overstretched valley

the sun’s bleaching stare,

the darkest days’ frigidity,

and the vandals’ reckless insults.

It continued its vigil

while she pulled the many splinters

of his and her shattered oneness

from her heart

and painstakingly reassembled them

into the singlehood she bore

back home from her retreat on the valley floor

up the hill’s steepness,

leaving below a stagnant pool of grief

to be absorbed into the same earth

their fledgling dreams once looked down upon.

***

Thomas Redoubt

Thomas Redoubt is from Freedom, Pennsylvania, a small town on the Ohio River north-west of Pittsburgh and now lives in Allison Park, Pennsylvania. He was trained in science and law spent the first half of his non-literary career as a materials science researcher and the second half as a lawyer and law school adjunct professor. Redoubt has a passion for writing poetry and sees poetry as the epitome of one person to communicate his/her thoughts and feelings to another.