In your absence it is my companion a lover whose passion fills the room with electricity who has come home from a war ragged with raw instinct who wraps his arms around my waist and peers into my soul whose hands stroke my hair and who leans in to give a kiss on the forehead uttering the words “You’ll never be alone”. ~Melissa Carpenter www.treasureoftradition.com

night falls on the sound --silence ~Melissa Carpenter

the stars climb the dark night weaving their illumination into the trellis of the sky and I rooted to the earth like a rose blushed by the morning sun crawl toward the light then curl into myself at dusk away from the shadows that leave me exposed ~Melissa Carpenter treasureoftradition.com

It was a hot day in early September, a day when the air stood heavy around the wide railed porch where Oliver Birch sat in his usual spot, a white spindle backed rocking chair with Irena, his wife of 51 years, beside him. …

I’m told if your child listens to classical music he will know beauty as he grows and his mind will drift to heaven. This is what I want for you, my son. When you gaze into the sky one autumn evening and see the starlings climb above the horizon their…

When I was young I dreamt of this place, of sweet evenings by the fire the father of our sons stoking the wood cracking under blue flames while I wrap them in hand-sewn quilts covering them in folds of generations who knew simple love distilled from the complexity of motherhood. We grow older together like maples wearing new foliage each season. Yet we remain a refuge for the birds who build their nests in spring and take leave each winter into the foreshortened sky only to return.

A man behind the counter hides behind a leafy newspaper oblivious to our disposable world. Wandering across waxy wood floors the scent of old days and dust permeates our souls. On the back wall stand three cuckoo clocks, dark and lean with only the past to mark, mechanisms broken and hands stuck at once upon a…

The paper blossoms with their amber eyes have withered; their bodies collapsed on their hills; their earthen wombs swollen and expectant planted by those with wisdom to sow. We wait until the sun leans westward then pull the brown vines from their hills shaking the small tubers from the roots; the larger ones…

In the lead of winter bleak trees stand like forks in clotted cream about to fall from the weight on their branches. There is only darkness when we wake. Even the promise of the solstice doesn’t resurrect the feeling of hope we had last spring. It seems never to come and mired in our world without miracles we cannot see past the shadows that fall outside the windows. The world is a specter that sweeps past us without notice in a corridor filled with doors leading to nowhere but here. We are haunted by the silent snow that drifts against the door falling over the threshold when we try to leave.