My First Attempt at Poesy...

I love writing but it has always been prose that has gotten the best of me. This is my first modest and amateurish foray into poetry, and it's also my dicey entrace into this blog. You can imagine the deluge of apprehension coming over me...

An Unexpected Absence in the Ice-Cold Night by Heber Gurrola
-This is partly based on a true story I read. Link provided at the end-.

(My first attempt at poesy)

Little girl gazed mesmerized into the constellation
She was counting stars, which she believed were God's creation
Two hours had passed since an elusive firefly
Had led her astray into the teeth of the ice-cold night.

She sat on the stairway two weeks before
Wearing a little bodice dress, she was only 5 years old
Wielding a magic wand she had cast a spell
So her teeny tea cup would turn into a squirrel

Now she sat spellbound on a protruding rock
In the middle of the desert, fraught with trepidation and shock
The fear of being lost began to carve into her skin
Little girl was all alone, her childlike valor was now wearing thin.

If she yesterday cavorted freely on the snow-covered grass
Tonight she trudged along the desert, all her bliss had come to pass
In fact the temperature kept dropping, two more hours had gone by
When this dainty little princess finally started to cry

Her eyes were heavy and her lips were numb
The wind was freezing, it was eight below
She shed more tears 'til her eyes grew dry
As she wondered shivering, she wondered why

Why she had to follow that glimmering bug
Why she hadn't rather stayed in the safety of her own home
God knew she had asthma, He knew very damn well
That this unintended expedition could mean her departure from life on this earth

On a Sunday prior to this incident she had been assured
That Jesus watched over her from the heaven above
But now it seemed like Lucifer had taken over the world
Oh!  How strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord.

She was told that an angel would bless her, love her, guard her
But an epiphany made her realize that such angel was either fanciful or just absent
She'd vowed to her parents she'd never question their teachings
But she felt double-crossed, or such was now her inkling.

Little girl was now coughing miserably, she could barely feel her body
Frostbite had already claimed her toes, her skin..Oh dear!, where is mommy?
Blood dripped from her ears, her little pink coat was now ruined
What's daddy gonna say? He'll make me go stay in my room!

In a matter of minutes she got quite, still and utterly listless
A portentous silence now surrounded this beautiful princess
She had suffered gratuitously, indeed her agony was useless
If things happen for a reason, honestly, wasn't her predicament fruitless?

She would never count the flowers in her garden or the stars up by God's reign
She would never ever dance by herself under the rain
With the promise that tomorrow she'd feel nothing, no sorrow, no pain
She was informed by a wintry snowflake that her eyes would never open again

The moon loomed bright and high in the sky above
While her little heart strained tirelessly, then came to a stop.
Her tiny body laid supine, petrified in the bedeviled night
Her dolly kept her company, neither one now was alive

But this is at best perplexing, she went to school, did her homework and cleaned her room
She did well in her ballet classes, God knows we made all the right moves
Her parents looked for answers to her baby's disgraceful doom.
Her little brother had  no comment, his blank stare was fixed on the moon

Posthumous fretting and pondering, they're as common as they are futile
A five year old had died ignominiously, the universe had turned hostile
It never occurred to mom and dad that God, too, at times screws up
That even when cajoled onto his palm, we are as vulnerable and fragile as the mundane lot

Or maybe, just maybe.... there is no loving daddy perched upon His throne
Who oversees our actions and can listen to our thoughts
Perhaps this watchful father who sits diaphanous in the firmament aloft
Is just as mythical a figure as Krishna, Vishnu, Apollo and Thor.






*Afterword

I'm completely aware of the limitations in my metric. I'm not a professional poet and I wrote this in five hours so I sometimes found myself jamming too many syllables in one single line, thus detracting from the poignancy and cadence of the verse. In the same vein, the use of modern language and some cacophonpus synalephae throughout the last two stanzas effectively managed to atenuate the emotional coloring of the ending.