Written 25th August, 2026
This Week's Poetry Art Challenge: Memory
Write a poem about a memory that you can’t shake.
Once they named me god. At my mouth they placed figs, oil, to the lip of my fire, sang their children’s names into my warm, sulphurous breath. They named my smoke a blessing. They read the fire in my throat as fathers read a child’s brow, and trusted the mountain to sleep. But then I awoke The seal of my deep heart fractured and poured night over their doorways. My rivers of flame took the olive groves, the market’s clay jars, the bridal veils— took every voice that had sung to me. Now my blood lies blackened, cool as a curse beneath the moon. Yet it retains the mould of their streets, the shallow bowl where rain still gathers, the doorway’s buried threshold, the clasped hand none may uncover. Pilgrims come with polished lenses. They praise the dark waves of my skin, say: How still. How beautiful. They do not hear the dead turning in my stone. I hear them. In the long moonless watch, their prayers return unbidden— not as incense, nor as praise, but as small voices under rock, calling the god who did not spare them.
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