Greeting Harold

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Today I am writing a bit of prose for a wonderful new prompt over at Poets United: Telling Tales with Magaly Guerrero a Pantry of Prose # 1.  This prompt will post on the first Sunday of every month, and Magaly wants us to put our prose on.  We always have until Tuesday evening, so come join us!

Greeting Harold,

It was cold on earth where Willa waited for her next assignment.  Harold a Caucasian male with 46 earth years, was due to arrive any minute.  He had been in a coma for weeks from head trauma from a beating he endured in an alley way, but his time to enter the new realm was today.

 

Being a soul greeter was an important and delicate responsibility.  Willa in all her smallness of spirit had been holding this great task for centuries, and at times it could seem overwhelming.

Her last greeting was a lady named Loraine who was a lonely soul with no family and her story was a sad one.  She had become a hoarder; keeping everything her hands touched.   Ironically, she had died from a fire in the night, trying to re-enter the home to salvage everything she felt she could not live without.  It took quite a while before she was ready to move on to the other side.

As Willa thought of  Loraine she could see Harold edging before her.    He was a mirror image of his former body, yet different, he appeared before her in all his knowing and confusion wrapped together like braided hairs.  Harold had been a homeless man with nothing to his name including respect.  In the hospital he had been John Doe # 37, but now his identity was known.  Harold L. Bowers, son of a senator, oldest brother, and a man who had been a lawyer before he lost everything to addiction.

“Greetings Harold”, she said as she reached out her spirit toward his.  He fell into her like a weary man plopping into the most comfortable chair he had ever known.  Willa’s spirit smiled.  Most soul’s wanted to go back, and could not bear to leave behind all they had known, but not Harold.  Willa found that greeting souls was always a lesson in some way for the new arrival, but today the lesson was hers to hold.

Click HERE to see the poem that inspired it.

Places We Have Never Been

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Linking with Imaginary Gardens "The Tuesday Platform"

There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. ~Josephine Hart

I have never measured a man
 the way this world determines
 worthiness and what is considered good
 drawing worldly lines and graphs

like maps to places we have never been

 every soul has its own charted territory with
unmarked roads that no other footsteps have tread
 the terrain can be rough and gravel ridden
or it can be smoothly paved like palace walls
but it is a diverse map every time
like fingerprints have paths that cannot be replicated
and all the history soil and sediment
make rocks no other hands can throw
the passing traveler may see
the built up cities but never
understand the architecture
nor pass through the open doors
yet still we try to predict mold and form
what we expect someone else should be
we draft our own plans
 of what truly makes someone
deserving of honor and acknowledgement
or justify our eye contact and attention
who will we let in our living room
whose hand will we hold on to
who will we truly love.





Sedimentary rocks are formed through the gradual accumulation of sediment sand on a beach, mud at a river bed.  As the sediment is buried it is compacted as more and more material is deposited on top.   Eventually the sediment will become so dense that it is essentially rock.   An explanation according to Wikipedia of course, but our lives are like this.  They are an accumulation of sediment that gets compacted more and more.  All the hurts, bitterness, experiences and dirt that living can provide push deeper and compress building the being that we are.  Each of us a different landscape, yet all truly the same continent.

©Carrie Van Horn 2019

The Souls of My Feet

Magpie #28

When life comes after me like june bugs on my lit up porch

and my bunions have blisters and my brain feels scorched

there is one thing that sooths my soul

it is a warm bath

with painted toes.

Magpie Tales a wonderful site for writers!