This poem took 3 tries to write and a lot of inner talk until I allowed the words to flow from me.
The prompt came from Diane at Urban Siren Creative and her SagitarriUs Challenge.
The image is one I first created in 2009 and I found when searching after a time when my children and I were literally stranded on the prairie in South Dakota, miles from people we knew.
Take 3 – Stranded
She was the kid who never made it through a sleepover.
It was a visceral thing: She needed to go home because
There was a never-absent belief that if she left for too long…
Upon her return the family home would be empty of the people
Who at least pretended to love her
They would leave for better spaces and a different, much
Better and probably blonde thin daughter/sister would
Replace her awkward, brunette and perpetually pudgy self
Adult Her isn’t comforted by the fifth grade and the seventh grade
and the fifty-six-year-old defection and subtraction of friendship
She has survived other circumstances. Cancer, death of friends, bankrupty.
There are fundraising marathon sleepovers for cancer survivors but
Never a tea party for “stranded survivors” – those who were exiled,
Dead-alive by those who pretended to once at least care about them.
Maybe the kid who begged to be taken home for fear of being left
Was the wisest of us all – or at least the one with the widest future view.
Or perhaps many of us are stranded together
We just haven’t figured that out yet
And are beginning to awaken to the reality we
Are the life raft. We are the search party.
Our collective heartbeats are the search – and
Now, coming to be, the found lights.
No longer. Stranded.