PROMPT #449
I have chosen two lines from an essay on Shakespeare by James Baldwin
No time can be easy if one is living through it.
That is why he is called a poet
Include one or both the lines in your piece, with no reference to Shakespeare. The line of thought needs to be yours, not influenced by classics.
Reena’s Xploration Challenge #449
While We Are Living It
No time can be easy if one is living through it.
History looks tidy from a distance.
Years fit neatly between two numbers.
Wars acquire beginnings and endings.
Storms become statistics.
Loss becomes a paragraph.
Survival becomes a sentence.
But nobody lives in hindsight.
We live on Tuesday morning
when the alarm rings too early.
We live beside hospital beds,
inside unanswered questions,
through bills and broken plans
and nights when sleep refuses to come.
We live while the ending
is still unwritten.
That is what makes a difficult time difficult.
Not only what happens—
but not knowing
what happens next.
Will the person we love recover?
Will the money last?
Will the storm pass?
Will tomorrow be kinder?
History already knows.
We don’t.
And still—
someone makes coffee.
Someone feeds the dog.
Someone hangs washing beneath
an uncertain sky.
Someone laughs at precisely
the wrong moment
and saves everybody in the room.
Someone plants flowers
without any guarantee
they will be there to see them bloom.
And somewhere,
someone writes.
Not because words can stop wars,
heal bodies,
pay bills
or turn clocks backwards.
But because there are things
statistics cannot remember.
The trembling hand.
The ridiculous joke.
The empty chair.
The first morning
someone realised
they had survived.
The ordinary courage
of getting up again.
Perhaps that is what writers do.
We gather the fragments
that history drops.
We give grief a name,
joy somewhere to live,
and memory a voice.
We leave little lanterns
beside the road
for whoever comes after us.
And perhaps, years from now,
someone will find those words
and understand that we were never
merely dates in a history book.
We were frightened.
We were hopeful.
We were tired.
We loved.
We kept going.
That is why he is called a poet.
Not because he escaped his time—
but because he noticed
what it felt like
to be alive inside it.
💜
With love, coffee, poetry, and stardust,
— Maggie The Afterlove Voice 💫
My new song “Silenced,But not broken ” is out on streaming platforms.
Lyrics video :
https://ditto.fm/silenced-but-not-broken
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