Sepia stains this house
with time passed, time mourned,
choices made or not.
Of fingers jaundiced,
shrunken, swirling amber
nectar, ice clacking,
moments metered, air
hissing via canal,
to make red what’s blue
in you, yellowed, smoky
scented, canyon carved,
starving for space enough
to mutter, “Sorry.”
The tip flares, fizzles.
You gasp; all goes black.
Linda Simoni-Wastila crunches numbers by day and churns words at night. You can find her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction in Tattoo Highway, Six Sentences, The Sun, and Boston Literary Magazine, as well as in several anthologies, including the forthcoming Neuropsychiatry in Poetry. Linda lives and loves in Baltimore, a town where her Northern birthright and Southern upbringing comfortably comingle. http://linda-leftbrainwrite.blogspot.com
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Posted on March 22, 2010 in Other
19 Responses to “YELLOW • by Linda Simoni-Wastila”
Comments
« YELLOW • by B Comet | Home | WANDERER • by p.k.n.panicker »
March 22nd, 2010 at 5:05 am
I can hardly imagine anything more depressing. But a very well written poem.
March 22nd, 2010 at 6:36 am
Skillfully written. The first and last stanzas say it all.
March 22nd, 2010 at 7:51 am
Knocks the breath out of me. Well done.
Deborah
March 22nd, 2010 at 8:31 am
Smoking is so tragically deadly a habit. I can feel the smell of stale smoke in your piece. Great work.
March 22nd, 2010 at 8:46 am
A timeless piece of life lived under regretful choices – excellent prose, Linda.
March 22nd, 2010 at 9:20 am
Wow, beautiful, emotional piece Linda. You say alot in those few lines. I’m still reeling. Super job on this.
March 22nd, 2010 at 12:29 pm
Beautiful poem!
March 22nd, 2010 at 2:33 pm
I liked this part best, for some reason:
moments metered, air
hissing via canal,
to make red what’s blue.
Probably because I understood what was going on and I liked how it was expressed.
If this replaced the Surgeon General’s warning on smokes, you might singlehandedly reduce nicotine addiction by 50%.
–John
March 22nd, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Wonderful work…
March 22nd, 2010 at 7:27 pm
Thank you all for reading and your comments. This is a very personal piece about how smoking ruined the lives of two very special people – my mother and her sister. Peace…
March 22nd, 2010 at 9:00 pm
Skilfully written and touches the heart too.
March 22nd, 2010 at 9:18 pm
Sad, but well done.
March 23rd, 2010 at 1:28 am
I think it’s because “sorry” isn’t enough.
March 23rd, 2010 at 5:04 am
This one read like an old-timey 48, bursting with nostalgia and a long forgotten time and space
March 23rd, 2010 at 8:57 am
It even includes the old sepia photographs. A lot of memories packed in here.
March 26th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
I like the way this litmus paper of a poem notes that only two colors are read by the jaundiced. All the other many colors of “sorry” are left out by the gaseous-canaled peristaltic.
March 26th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
We must all be thankful to Kali that the fields are no longer wasted with tobacco and out lives flourish with fruit trees and showers instead.
March 26th, 2010 at 1:37 pm
Re: above – that was meant to be “our lives” not “out lives”
March 31st, 2010 at 9:23 pm
[...] Day Poets: “An Ill Kept Tenament” by L R Humphries, “The Passenger” by Douglas Pugh, and “Yellow” by Linda [...]