And now she is a widow

walking into the dim parlor,
pausing between their worn chairs,
watching rain run down the window,
listening to the unfamiliar silence,
picking up the book she'd been reading,
touching the top of the bookmark,
sliding open the pages,
finding the paragraph where she'd stopped,
the sentence where he'd died.

Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.