I sit by the window on a blistery winter’s night,
A blank page before me – a head so drowning in ideas, but nothing to write.
“Why write tonight? For there will always be time, a tomorrow, a new day to begin,”
Said I, young and unconquerable with the great world at my greater feet.
Feeling content, grasping for justification at my lack of words, I push the paper aside,
Where perhaps it will be moved on that fabled tomorrow.
A chill colder than the frost slithers down my spine…
For there is a face in the window.
Frightened, I search the strange woman’s features –
Her crow’s feet, her white hair, brittle and kinked with age,
The deep-set wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and between eyebrows.
It is when I observe the eyes that a different fear settles in my entire being:
The eyes are mine.
Within them I see a somber pleading, a quiet desperation.
Who I am meets who I become.
Youthful, I am not. Unconquerable proves otherwise.
I no longer have the promise of time, a tomorrow, a new day.
Finality tightens its grip around my throat
When, as that transcendent morning breaks, all I could offer was a blank page.
