Requiem for a Lonely Woman
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This poem embodies my childhood memory of an old woman who lived up the road from my grandmother. The timeframe was the late 1950s. The woman's name was unknown, though some speculated that her name was "Grace." She played an old upright piano late at night. Her music echoed hauntingly through the holler. She was treated cruelly by people who didn't know or understand her. They made up stories that she killed her husband and children. Upon reflection, I believe the woman was a victim of misundersanding and loneliness her entire life.
In the outskirts, where whispers weave through the wind,
there stands a farmhouse, its timbers groaning with secrets,
a silhouette etched against the horizon’s fading light.
Once, it was alive, pulsing with the beat of day-to-day,
but now, it’s shrouded in a cloak of solitude,
walls lined with the echoes of laughter long gone,
rooms filled with the heavy air of stories untold.
The woman who lived there, a mystery, a shadow,
wandered its halls like a ghost, her presence barely felt
but in the gentle ivory caress of piano keys
that floated through the night, a sorrowful symphony
played to an audience of moon and stars.
Folks in town, they gossiped, cruel jests hidden behind closed doors,
labeling her a recluse, a witch, a specter of the past,
never understanding the weight of loneliness she carried,
a burden that bent her shoulders and dulled her eyes.
She found peace in her music, notes rising and falling,
like the breaths she drew, deep and resonant,
a language only she and the night could comprehend.
The farmhouse, with its peeling paint and creaking floors,
stood as a testament to her existence,
its decay mirroring the abandonment she felt,
doors no longer opening to welcome guests,
windows looking out with a yearning for the world.
Inside, the piano waited, its keys now silent,
dust gathering like a blanket, a comfort in the stillness,
each particle a memory, a moment frozen in time.
And so, the house remains, a relic of loneliness,
a monument to the misunderstood,
its story floating with the wind, carried through the fields,
a melody played on the strings of time,
eternal, echoing, alone.
Copyright © Don Iannone | Year Posted 2024
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