SOL: February Found Objects Prompts

 

It’s Tuesday and time for SOL.  Please head to Two Writing Teachers for more slices.
This is from Laura Shovan’s blog.  This February she’s posting found objects for people to respond in either poetry or prose.  Is this cool? A one hundred year old mailing box.

Her frail hands
handed me the box.
Take it, she said,
don’t look inside.
Burn it.

Fingers crossed,
I promised
to spark a match
and watch the flames
when
the new moon
tipped like a bowl
hung low in the sky.

She crossed over
pulled
by the tide of life.

The box
rests on the mantel.
Its secrets
tug until I must
open it like
Pandora.

And when I do?
It’s a letter from
the war.
She’d have to return
her wedding dress.
He was not returning.

© 2016 Jone Rush MacCulloch all rights reserved

This mailing box reminded me of the great secret about an aunt.  After she passed, my brother and I discovered she’d been engaged but received word that he had changed his mind about the marriage.  It really explained a lot about this aunt as she never married.  This was a deep hurt.