This month following Peace Poetry Postcard Month only saw two pieces of writing from my nimble little fingers. Both of these came from work with my writer’s group. Thank goodness for this wonderful group or there would have been nothing.

To get ready for National Poetry Writing Month AND Global Poetry Writing Month, I am offering a last piece of narrative for a while.  You might read about Peter a few weeks ago. And maybe you read Shards. I have no character name for her as of yet, but the list is growing. Today you meet Yanna.

Each of us in the writing group was challenged to use: vigorous, idle, misfortune, photograph, misery, sunburned, continually, proprietor, foaming, amiably. My cliche, which I didn’t use: Sit on the fence. And my opening line: Three days of hard freeze…

Yanna

Three days of hard freeze crept through the grass making it crisp emerald spikes standing like a tiny but eternal forest. It was a good thing Yanna was smallish.

Yanna called herself “smallish.” Being small wasn’t a misfortune when one could walk through a crisp emerald forest without notice. Yes. She was smallish.

She found comfort in not being noticed. Yanna could slip through and around without an eyelash blinking at her passing. She could stand in a corner and watch those silly big ones thrash about in the misery of their large lives. She could place a piece of bread where it was needed. Then she would melt into the blooms without notice when spring was full.

This was Yanna’s gift. She really was just smallish. She wasn’t a faerie or sprite. She was a regular woman. She was no smaller than a petite dancer en pointe, but no one ever noticed her. Her misfortune would come when she needed to be big, foaming, sunburned from the flame of passion.

Today Yanna was idle in the frost. She rested the pads of her fingers on the green icy spikes. Little by little adding more pressure pushing down, waiting for a breaking point. Her’s. Not the grass.

“Please, don’t do that.” A voice from behind startled her. She stopped but didn’t turn around.

Someone noticed her.

She pushed her hand down once more, but ever so faintly.

With more force the voice came again, “Don’t do that.”

So she stopped. Yanna wanted to look behind her. It was a deep, mellow voice. Somehow, it seemed peaceful in its request.

She felt a presence slowly sitting behind her. He must have been close. She felt a warmth starting to encompass her. Within in seconds the crystallized grass she was kneeling on and the grass under her hand melted back to its early spring vigor. There was a neat circle of deep soft green girlding them.

She wished she had a camera. If she did, she would turn quickly, use it, and disappear. Yanna was not only smallish, but she was quick. She wanted a photograph to look at later when she was safely tucked away where he wouldn’t be. Where he couldn’t be because he was big and she had a smallish room in a smallish house with a door hidden under moss and greens and windows only a smallish person could look through and see.

Again, his words flowed warming their circle. He was poetry she could not and would not ever remember. He was the proprietor of a shop of words that would bring healing and rest, two things she didn’t realize she needed.

Amiably, his words continued to spiral around and around her as ice melted into earth quenching roots, not just outward leaves. Nourishing her heart and soul, not just her body.

It was just what the first day of spring yearned for after dry winter days that crumbled and cracked Yanna’s heart.