Hello and welcome to my series called Word Not World Series, an episodical poetry anthology inspired by the words you requested from a picture I posted on my Instagram story. The most recent installment featured this beautiful picture below:
(Artist unknown, found on Pinterest)
A Girl Called Fahrenheit
(Word: Flames)
I am a cognizant flame,
aware of the damage I inflict,
born from the funeral pyre,
sick from the smoke I tread the woods carefully,
keeping to the dirt road,
lighting the caps of mushrooms to create sentinels
to keep me to my word that I will only be a guide,
a star pacing, waiting for a mortal to ask for advice,
not an immortal feigning compassion
only to flex their power.
*
Nebula
(Word: Glowing)
You know how stars learn that their light lives on
even after they are gone?
Yeah, she glowed like that.
*
Destiny
(Word: Destiny)
Her destiny was to leave the world
a little brighter than how it was when she entered it,
to leave all the lights on in every room in the house,
to waltz between dusk and dawn as the streetlamps finally cut on,
to tease the flames
and to herd the moths to watch, not wander.
*
Hero
(Word: Hero)
She walked a little slower behind us,
expressionless,
watching as the wind picked up and raised hell,
wrenching birds out of their roosts,
bowing the canopies of the trees.
The scar that now cradled her cheek glinted in the fading light,
shining like a blade drawn, bared against the sky.
She fretted her eyebrows,
she flexed her hands out of fists and walked on, without a word.
I should have known better,
what she struggled against in the quiet,
how she was so tired of fighting alone,
I thought it was justice,
and her hunger to provide it,
but I was wrong,
she wanted her own vengeance.
*
Heaven-Lee
(Word: Divine)
She was divine on borrowed time,
an angel amongst us.
*
Bittersweet
(Word: Finale)
That was the end for me.
Not in a bad way,
not in a sad way,
in the way that the waves that crash onto the shore
are washed away,
how the spots on a fawn evaporate,
how the fire dies,
it’s not a bad thing,
it’s not a sad thing,
it just is,
like making noise as you walk through a forest
no matter how hard you try,
you still make noise existing as I did.
Yes, I am a Was.
Not a bad thing,
not a sad thing,
I was a being
and now I am passed living.
It was my hour, my minute,
whatever you want to say,
I laid in my bed and exhaled under the halo of the Sun’s rays,
it wasn’t sad, though we cried,
it wasn’t bad, even though it would be easier to call it so,
it was Life, and I lived it well,
falling asleep to find myself
in the shoes of a former shell,
it’s not a bad thing,
it’s not a sad thing,
it is.
*
Thank you so much for tuning into this installment of Word Not World Series. Every installment is held on Saturday via my Instagram (@enis.st.sparrow) story. If you are interested, request your own word for me to write for. Until then, thank you and good night!