The Place Inside

This week’s Soul Circle prompt invited us to think about the word inside.

I took the question to my favourite writing place, a graveyard.

I expected memories. I expected ghosts. I expected the dead.

Instead, I found a tree.

Or perhaps I found a doorway.

The Tunnel in the Tree

Sandra lives in the folds of my ribs.

You need a passport to enter the counties of betrayal.

Poems come from the river of my belly.

Children climb the stars like moths up my knees.

The tunnel begins in the trunk of an old tree.

The elders built it.

Feathers gather in the entrance.

Moths move freely through the cracks.

There are bus journeys here that never announce their destination.

Funfairs travel on the backs of double-deckers.

My spine is a road.

It keeps offering me the driver’s seat.

I keep choosing to walk.

Someone keeps trying to bury it.

By morning

it has flowered again.

Reflection :

Afterwards, I sat a while longer and watched the graveyard.

The long grass leaned one way.

Pigeons circled a tree, abandoned it, then circled the next.

I found myself wondering if they were looking for something better.

Perhaps we all are.

Thank you, Beth Kempton for another prompt that opened a door I didn’t know was there.