PAD Day 9: Things in Need of Love

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a love and/or anti-love poem, and (2) write a list poem (inspired by the lists of The Pillow Book by the medieval Japanese writer Sei Shōnagon). I actually went a little further and used the weekly word bank from the Sunday Whirl blog - their bank of a dozen words for this week were: guns, lose, way, chime, room, order, smells, now, ring, want, chatter, fear. So here is a prose poem in the style of Sei Shōnagon:

Things in Need of Love

(after Sei Shōnagon)

A broken wind chime. A robin with a broken wing.  Drooping tulips. A stray dog who smells the air outside a steak house. A family of eight in a one-bedroom apartment.

A man with an unwanted engagement ring. A house with peeling paint. A city with a burning river. A child sleeping under a mylar blanket in a cage. A man trying to sleep over a heating grate in the street, his teeth still chattering.

A man in a bar ordering his seventh beer. A man who has long ago forgotten why he is so angry now. A woman in too much fear to leave her husband. A veteran who wants to stop having nightmares.

An old woman who loses her way home. A school whose children were murdered by guns. A large country with a wedge driven into it.