Page 25 - HEF Pen & Ink 2022

All That Matters By Ella Shropshire
I stare into the snow
New and twirling at a streetlight corner, its glow vestigial to all but foot traffic With each cold drop on my tongue, the fog in the valley is clearing
The snow disappears around a bend, the mountainside blocking it,
Reappears on the street, falling light and beautiful.
What a fool I was to think it ever fell for me
It will melt by tomorrow, but for once I’ll learn to survive, not suffer,
For it does not melt for me, either.
It will snow again, in a day, a month, I don’t know, I don’t care
For it is snowing now under the lonely streetlight
And that is all that matters
The stars are death-fetches of stars long past, giant ghosts shining above us Memento Mori
The stars are dead, shimmering phantoms in the sky
Why should I ponder their mortality? The stars are not mine.
Tonight, they are bright, alive to us as they ever seemed from where we stand, Looking as they have always been
Now they are alive
Dancing in the sky just as they had before I came, just as they will after I have gone But in this moment, they flicker and shine, and I am blessedly alive to see them, And that is all that matters
Each step I take I cannot take again, my histories writ in stone,
Recorded somewhere in minds separate from mine.
The end of summer is not mine to mourn, the rise of winter not mine to revel in,
The snow does not exist to pull me out of my own mind, the stars do not exist for me to admire Time marches on forever and once I have wilted and gone
The stars will still shine,
The snow will still fall,
Summer will always end,
But so shall winter
And summer shall come again
Time will march on, and none of it was for my sake, it was not mine
And nothing ever will be, save maybe words put on paper, thousands of poems and songs and stories, Which bubbled up from under my own skin, flowed to my fingertips
and painted themselves on the page
Those are mine, if the snow and the stars, the winter and the summer cannot be
I will own nothing but my words, long as I live
And that is enough.
That is all that matters
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