Poetry Challenge #24: Three-Legged Chair Poem

Before we get started this week, please do check out last week's tributes to the tragedy and heroic efforts we've witnessed in Haiti. You can read them here.

This week's challenge is once again borrowed from a terrific website, ReadWritePoem. They have offered up the picture to the right of this paragraph and encouraged their readers to devise a poem trying to explain or describe what is happening here. Why is the figure wearing a hood? How did the chair get there? Why is it broken? Why is the figure contemplating the chair? What is holding the chair up? You can answer any, all, or none of these questions, just use the picture as your inspiration this week.

Here is my poem:

Standing Still

Sometimes silence is the loudest sound.
This land has given up every trace
of life, save what I am clinging to
deep within myself.

My hood drawn up against
the whipping wind,
I cannot bear to break my gaze.
This chair appears useless,
yet in all its brokenness
it defies gravity and common sense
merely by remaining upright.

The same could be said
for certain human spirits.
Grief, disability, mental struggle
may be their “missing leg,”
yet they remain standing
in spite of all that would see them fall.

Merely looking at this oddity
gives me hope, regardless
of my own local tragedies.
It is almost as if someone placed it here
just for me to stumble upon,
a small sign
that all will be right with the world
if I can hang on.

So, take a look, have a think, and please share what you come up with here!

Photo credit: "December 21, 2007: #25" by Sepulture {Mood Disorder}.