pictured words

DISPIRITED

Darkness descended
within and without.
No glint of joy.
No moon to spill soft light.

Margins blurred between night and heart
as she sat silently,
giving no voice to the shadows within.

He held her silence,
and built her a fire in the hearth.

Her eyes fixed on the flames,
as if her only solace.
He tended the fire long into the night,
until the final log was nearly consumed.

He then rose from his rocker,
split it,
and kept the flames alive.

© Marie Elena Good, 2012 (reworked in 2026)

This expresses a true event of an evening during one of my daughter’s darkest seasons and her rien remarkable act of sensitive selflessness.