The Garden
The pensive woman waited by the gatewith no key hanging from her chain.
Often times she came here wishing for
a rescue, a miracle, a change in herself.
Now, here she was once again staring
out through the rusty bars that keep her
captive inside a dead garden of lost hopes.
Past those confining bars was her redemption.
Her dreams lie just beyond her reach.
Closing her tear soaked eyes she imagined
a world full of life, color, excitement and choice.
Slowly she began to move upward, rising above
the broken earth beneath where once she stood.
"Please," she begged. "Let this be my escape."
Then the voices began again. Those hideous,
destructive, hate-filled voices of doom tore at
her imagination, ripping it to blackened rags
leaving her again standing in the dead garden
alone in her emptiness, lost in her yesterdays.
With her head hanging down in submission,
hidden by the tangled strands of her dull, uncombed hair,
she turned away and disappeared in the
wasteland of cruel injustice, a purgatory for abused
and neglected souls who bury themselves in the carnage
of self annihilation, leaving death as the only salvation.
As she wandered among the dead, her heart began to beat.
Looking inside herself, she noticed the color red glowing,
growing, shinning like a beacon from an internal lighthouse.
With each beat, she felt a force pulling her toward the gates
again. "Is this me? Am I living?" She whispered to herself.
"I am!" she said louder. "I am!"
Stronger! The heart beat stronger. With each step she took,
the color radiated from her chest, then her eyes, out through
her fingertips, shooting like comets across the midnight sky.
On the other side of the gates a dove cooed, a lamb was born.
The stars began to streak through eternity. Flowers turned their
faces to the heavens and sang with the angels. Love grew like
roses on a living vine, climbing along the fence line, entwining
itself between the rusty bars of the gate. Green entered into the
dead garden. Ivy, rich with tentacles that rooted themselves
beneath the broken soil, sprung up and spread across the
empty desert of lost hopes.
"Look around," called the dove.
"Raise your head," said the flowers.
"Listen to the music," cried the lamb.
"Resurrection," sang the Angels
As the woman, now covered in the red glow of love, raised
her head, she found herself in the garden of life surrounded
by roses filled with hope, imagination, and creation.
Rainbows replaced the nightsky with brilliant hues of heavenly
shades of magnificient colors unlike she had ever dreamed.
And the gate, well the gate, was an arbor
through which she past on her way into her future.
She now flies with the doves, sings with the angels, plays
with the lambs, and rejoices in love.
Kathy Lockhart
10/31/06
Short story by Kathy Lockhart
Read 987 times
Written on 2006-11-01 at 04:36
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