The Woman With Too Much Sadness
poetry by Lucy Whitehead
Once there was a woman whose sadness overflowed.
She cried for hours, days, weeks until her face became
a waterfall. Her cheeks permanently pink.
Sick of buying tissues, she started to use
two silver buckets she’d found one day
in a neighbour’s abandoned shed, not knowing
they belonged to a magician (now dead).
She’d sit stroking her cats, buckets nestled
about her feet, listening to the plop, plop, tap
and rattle of tears hitting the metal. When
the buckets were full of silvery water, she poured
them into her flowerbeds and a large empty pond.
All winter, she staggered with buckets swinging
to her old dried-up garden. Even in dense blizzards,
she watered the earth with sadness, til
her tired heart let go. One warm spring day,
she wandered out in bare feet, buckets
only half full now. Such a song greeted her.
Flowers of every hue grown tall overnight
unfurled bright petals beneath trees laden
with ripe fruit, plump and glowing.
Butterflies danced in a dazzling blur
of hummingbirds, as burgeoning bushes dropped
swollen berries into impossibly green grass.
The pond was brimful and luminous,
bustling with a rainbow of sea creatures
frolicking in its salty waters, phosphorescent.
She assembled a deckchair in the centre of it all,
settled her tired body down and, smiling,
opened herself up to the sun.
Lucy Whitehead's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, Broken Spine Artist Collective, Burning House Press, Collective Unrest, Electric Moon Magazine, Ghost City Review, Mookychick Magazine, 3 Moon Magazine, Neon Mariposa Magazine, Parentheses Journal, Pink Plastic House, Pussy Magic, Re-side, and Twist in Time Magazine. She lives by the sea with her husband and cat. You can find her on Twitter @blueirispoetry.