~ The Door … ~

~ The Door … ~

Beyond the realms of untended kitchen garden,

And shrubby, weedy, once reigned patio,

That opens to an estranged world,

In the abandoned, back alleyway,

Housing lichens, liverworts, molds of all sorts,

A few unnamed mosses, unknown fungi, and some more,

On the bed of enkindled mud, so ravenously soaked,

In the rain of yester, deftly now aboard …

The fissured door — scraped, weather-beaten,

Face chafed and abraded — off-white, much grey —

Was painted in a mirth of white … such a delight,

When she was born, sixty seven years earlier …

Algae, tufts of kind bond, breathe to linger near-by,

On the chinked, hand-riven sweet chestnut laths,

The only ‘green’ company … this door must have …

Behind those vinyl-siding planked walls,

Havened in the fellow-feeling of dusty mildews,

Bedecked in dried honeysuckle vines, with no humming-bird in sight,

Dreaming of puddles of honeydew, splish sploosh splash,

Now she slumbers, soundly — cowered and shrunk,

Silhouetted like a baby, a dried-up waiflike shell,

Tucked tight, with smoothened smothered edges, if any,

Tenderly in a duck-egg-blue duvet-cover, frilly-frizzy,

With a young dreamy swan-down cozily filled in …

Who would refurbish an old spat? Is she alone?

A heck of a ‘cold and damp’ life, forsaken by the rest,

Blooms and burgeons, every day, relishing the nursing dark,

Raving in the crevices of her frailty … her shriveled heart …

Aye … ‘the door’ … to her unsheltered self ……