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A Spiritually Enlightening Online Magazine. November's Theme: "Gifts" "I've wrapped thoughts of summer around this gift," he wrote.
When I lifted the lid the size of my palm, cut out snowflakes, the weight of wings fluttered from my breath. In the lamplight, they shimmered like the surface of the bay that evening. One summer we watched a white moon cut the sea in half as we held hands. The contrast of imagery left me speechless—we had always talked of sliding with the seasons, or surrendering to their drastic change of moods as he put it.
One never expects to receive the gift desired, Eli used to moan over a pile of boxes meant as a surprise. I had a hand in re-wrapping a few of them for the charity dinner at a community centre this year. A shredder among them had felt heavy in my hand even as I turned it over to tighten a straw ribbon of tantalizing blue.
Eli and I gave away another shredder a year ago when "it ate up" a thin document I hadn't meant to destroy. I had told Eli, excusing myself that the machine remained breathing as if impatient for the next feed that I had to scramble for more paper to the slit that was its mouth. He had laughed at me, saying that my gift of words absolved me.
We had since transformed the chore of shredding into an exchange of imagined battles with uncanny enemies like a bottle opener. Scissor in hand, we would snip away documents I had sorted out as we spun our tales.
One evening, Eli pulled out from under the dinner table a scrabble board. I had said that's so outdated. Not if on it you form a word from a letter we would like to gift each other with, he had retorted.
We finished snipping to bits a whole year's mountain of junk mail when I gifted him with the letter 'e' to begin the word "en suite", meaning how we have built a gift shelf with mere words, and I began spinning them: a cascade of summer weeds on the rocks, hermit crabs nestling on our footmarks on the beach, stones on the river bed spelling our names.
He came home late one evening but failed to warn me. He didn't have to but he created a storyboard in single words from an alphabet cereal I had kept for a niece. "Sorry is lame. Senile moment more like it. Forgot to charge battery. Forgot to call from office. Had a beer with an associate. He dropped by from out of town." He filled in the rest of the story in a scrawl on the back of a junk mail. I had found the letter "f" from the rest of the cereal and laid it on the scrabble board. "Forgiven", I recited with flourish as I offered my hand for him to kiss. He really didn't have to explain.
Our walks turned up with more gifts at the dinner table. One winter I wrote my gift on his napkin "cabbage roses on a mulch bed, my heart blooming". He said he could never outdo my gifts but he did one day when he spelled the word, "Abakhazi" on the scrabble board. Our trip to the Abakhazi gardens in Victoria spawned in me more images that danced as words like the mossy edge of the pooling spring on the roots of aging rhododendrons, the quiet lullaby of the leaning old oaks, and the harvest of fallen suns I had a fill of as we passed by pumpkin patches on our way home.
Images that words crafted soon switched into photographs he snapped and flashed at me. On a trip to Harrison Hot Springs, he caught a solitary pair of blooming wild weeds swaying from a rock by the edge of the lake. Their blooming tips brushed as if in light kisses as they moved in velvety oneness. I had set on the scrabble board that first evening we came back home, the letter "s", which baffled him as he looked at the picture on the computer screen again. I had spelled out the word, "Surrender".
"Tell me how," he had asked chiding me.
"The way they let the wind play on them, swing or lash at them, the way they keep their hold together can only happen with surrender." The lines had started a poem I later asked a friend to embroider on white linen I had framed.
He smiled then as we relished our gifts of words in silence, un-wrapping the elusive gift of infinity.
surrender A seeker of truth and peace after tangled pathways, I have also found a voice in my search. A retired journalist, I have since focused on poetry and fiction. I launched my first book in Manila before migrating to Vancouver last year and recently received two honourable mentions for poetry.
Volume 8 Issue 1 ISSN# 1708-3265
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Surrender as a Gift
by Alegria Imperial
the way flowers
let the wind play
on weakness touching
—but not breaking—
makes surrender
a dream
a kind of touch
that instructs bees on
gentleness
a kiss that leaves
no mark—that glues
the heart
the way the mind
pulls threads off words
let gather from winds
bowers of leaves
a nest for globules
of light
name the globules
love the way wind
blows out the light the way
darkness kneads itself
to make love real
tempts the dawn
the way night
lets the wind
sough a kind of song
that shreds
the light
clouds the heart
grit not tears
fractures sight
the way the wind
lets dust ride whispering
words the kind
meant for tenderness
that weakens flowers
to surrender
to bloom
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