Prompt this week – Waiting
They wait, these angels
Until she goes to sleep
To stitch up her eyelids
With gossamer threads,
To weigh down her dreams
To repair pieces of herself
That she breaks in the day.
They see, these angels
Her light swaddled in dark.
They try to show her all day–
A billboard here, a flock of birds there
A flash mob here, a crooked tree there–
Show her how actually
Everything does go around her.
They want, these angels
They so long for her sight.
One day, she’ll remember, they say.
How, one day before conception,
She had won the lottery of the angels,
The supreme gift of being born on earth,
How she’d jumped and high-fived for joy.
They cry, these angels
Every time she cuts herself
With looks in the mirror;
With words untouched by lips;
With blades and bottles;
Everytime she waits to be perfect
Tires of the waiting
And still holds back on the living;
Everytime she chooses to listen
To other bleeding waiting souls
Because their embrace
Is all she knows of love;
They hold their breath all day
And blow into her each night
Hoping to resuscitate her.
Hoping that this will be the morn
She’ll wait no more to be whole
She’ll know she has arrived intact.
©Shweta Bhat
Shweta Bhat Poetry 