Merril posts today’s prosery challenge from dVerse, asking us to incorporate – as is – the line: “where can we find light in this never-ending shade?”
from Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” 

The Workhouse

The fixed sky has slummed over the town for too long, and the coal-smoke, and the fumes of charred pulses are trapped between the layers of smog and drizzle. Shawls bent over shopping baskets, the cracked old leather purse barely empty. Old School lording it over Technical College.

Eighteen-sixteen was the Year without a Summer, and I enquire into your whereabouts, grandparents’ grannies, or John Clare (poet) aged nineteen, or my yet unmet ancestor spirit guides.

Afraid of reverting to The Welfare; the back-to-back with one privy, eight homes; the Victoria Almshouse; the Mill Road Workhouse, founded 1838. Better to to ask again the question: where can we find light?

In this never-ending shade, there’s a movement at last: the clouds part, and through the crack filter the motes of sunshine, faltering and hesitating like the Song Thrush at the Gate to the Garden.

© Kathy Labrum McVittie 21 Jan 2024