No Words

No words spoken
between them
for thirty years.

So alike I forget
who said what to me.

The same story, a hundred times rehearsed.
The same story, just the names reversed.

A tag-team grudge:
hoping, dreading
that the other will die first.

Grandma survives the Olden Days,
pinched between no childhood
and old-age blindness.

Mother sobs like the three-year-old she is
back then.

Alone and terrified
in the dark,
they reach for each other,
imagining that

no one is there.

***

Barbara Jean lives and writes in western New York where she serves as a board member of the Chautauqua Literary Arts Friends at the Chautauqua Institution.  A songwriter and singer, Barbara uses the first person perspective in most of her writing with unpretentious language and themes that elevate the human condition.  Her first published work, The Non-Prophet, is a light-hearted companion piece to Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet.