Still Life by wildflower at Inkitt

Summary

The poem meditates on the loss of a loved one, capturing a suspended moment where time feels frozen in the immediate aftermath of grief. In this stillness, the speaker clings to silence as a refuge, desperately gathering fragments of the loved one’s stories, presence, and memory before they begin to fade. The pause becomes an emotional shelter, delaying the painful truth that once time moves forward, decay will touch both the body and memory, and loss must be fully acknowledged. The “still life” symbolizes the speaker’s wish to hold everything they love—unchanged, intact, and alive—in a single moment, before accepting the irreversible reality of death and separation.

Genre: Poetry

Author: wildflower

Status: Complete

Chapters: 1

Rating: n/a

Age Rating: 13+

Letter to an Angel

Suspended—

that’s how the air feels.

Quiet, hanging,

moving nowhere in particular.

The moment breath stills,

time folds into a soft slumber.

Will it wake again?

I’m not sure.

But in that hush,

everything freezes.

Still. Unmoving.

And in that thin slice of silence,

I’m scrambling to gather

every broken piece of your stories

and carve them to mind.

Because when time starts flowing again,

there will be decay—

in the body, in the memory,

in the little details we once knew.

When time moves,

the truth settles in.

And I’ll have to admit a loss.

So let me linger in this pause.

A still life—

everything I want

held in a single moment.