Written for dVerse Poets Prosery –
Paul Laurance Dunbar. Our host, Dora,
asks us to include the line below from Dunbar’s
poem, “Sympathy” in a 144-word piece of prose.
Here’s where the prompt took me.
“And the faint perfume from its chalice steals–“
The old man kept an empty birdcage on his windowsill for years after the bird was gone, and the mornings remained unchanged without it. His life was stuck in a meaningless loop.
He would notice the faint suggestion of dawn arriving before sound, before memory fully awoke. Then the rich perfume from the jasmine outside would drift in through the gap in the window frame from its shrub planted somewhere in the tangled garden below. On the sill beside the cage sat a clay chalice his daughter had made in school, and something from it steals into him still: its charming imperfections, her small hands, the morning she presented it to him with such ceremony.
He never replaced the bird. He never moved the chalice. To do so seemed somehow wrong.
Some vessels, he understood, are not meant to be filled again. Only remembered.
NAR©2026
144 Words
Nancy’s Notes: The line from the poem may be used exactly as written, or it may be changed with brakes or punctuation without altering the order of the words.
This is “Empty Cages” by Dan Fogelberg
Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
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