This Sunday’s poem of the week is: The Ring

I write and publish my poetry first on Instagram. Then on Sundays, I post the poem that received the most likes or comments here on my blog. Below is my most popular Instagram poem this week, “The Ring”.

Enjoy!

The Ring

From the seventeenth-century church
with the round steeple
at the centre of the town
where her mother and father married,
fifty years before,
a short walk still takes you
to the bench by the edge
of the water, on which
she made her proposal.

“What a bird!”  he said, that day,
and ever after (to annoy her?),
always laughing at how
she’d surprised him into it.
Down on one knee, a gold ring,
a flower for his lapel, the works.

Now, where their candlelights were lit,
and a choir once sang at their union,
their daughter enters
a cathedral of silence.

A few days before leaving home,
she was still wondering why
she needed to make this return
and today she is unsure
whether the water, so still
it looks like stone, is a lake
or a tidal pool.

It draws its light from the dawn,
and the moon and stars
burning themselves out
in smatters, all over the ceiling
of the sky. The ground
she stands on is polished mud,
and she is barefoot,
humble in her pilgrimage

As the subtle lap of a wave
reveals a tiny motion in the water,
she waits inside her glass bell
that still doesn't know how to ring.


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Orna Ross

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