The Estate Sale

 The 6th poem of the year (in the Deadlines for Writers group) is due today. The prompt is "tempted." I started there and ended up somewhere very different. Writers are commonly advised to "write what you know", and what I know right now is the settling of my parents' earthly estate. Here's the free verse poem I submitted. 

The Estate Sale

The long-empty driveway fills with cars and trucks.

The homeplace, alive again just for the day, braces for one last invasion.

Not the hordes of children whose excited voices once filled the yard with joy.

Not the recent lines of workers laboring to give the place a modern appeal,

The old house, instead, braces for one final invasion of strangers.

 

The front door, unalarmed, snubs the knocks of unknown visitors,

And they walk in as if visiting the corner store.

The back porch steps creak restlessly as the curious saunter up to the open doorway.

The opportunists, with darting eyes and careless hands, fill the hallway with the odor of greed.

The once-private bedroom grieves as a burly man in grease-stained jeans nonchalantly disassembles her bed.

Her pink robe, looking on from behind the door, cringes as the man discards the worn sheets with disdain and begins hauling her bed, in pieces, out the door.

 

Now without her cherished silverware and ubiquitous Blue Willow china,

The bereft dining room sets the table with silence and empty space.

Chairs are scattered and separated from their lifelong sisters.

Though once clustered together around the family table,

Each now stands alone – no longer part of the warmth of the family’s gathering place.

 

An interloper sits rocking in the 100-year-old rocking chair where Great Granny fed her babies.

Where Grandmother soothed the hurts of her toddlers.

The same rocking chair where she sat as neighbors comforted her all those years ago as the hearse bearing the body of her husband, pulled away.

Unknowing, unthinking, the squatter rocks and complains that the asking price for the old rocker is too high.

 

One by one, her things leave their cohorts and their home in alien arms.

A lifetime’s collection slowly reverses course and becomes uncollected.

In the quiet kitchen, where she used to gaze out the small window into the woods behind the house,

The half empty canister of tea stands in the corner and silently consoles the weeping sink,

And mourns too her absence.