Esther Chilton

Your new prompt word is

FLOWER

You might have a favourite flower. Perhaps it holds special meaning for you. We have real flowers and artificial flowers. Of course flower can also mean to develop. We also add other words to it – flower child, flower arranging and flower power, for example. What does this week’s prompt word mean to you?

Fact or fiction, prose or poetry, I would love to read your thoughts on this week’s prompt, but there’s no obligation to share your writing. Here is the work you shared on the last prompt VISION.

Therapy Bits:

Grief Blurs My Vision

Grief has no edges—
it spills, slow and quiet,
like fog across a window
I forgot was ever clear.

The world used to arrive in sharp lines:
corners of buildings,
the certainty of faces,
the way light knew where to fall.
Now everything trembles,
as if seen through water.

I blink,
but the blur does not lift.
It settles deeper,
a film behind the eyes,
a softness that erases distance
between what is gone
and what remains.

Your outline—
once so exact—
has dissolved into suggestion:
a voice I almost hear,
a shape I almost touch,
a name that echoes longer
than it should.

Even colors seem unsure now,
bleeding into one another,
refusing to stay whole.
The sky cannot decide
if it is blue or breaking.

And I move through it all
half-seeing, half-remembering,
learning the weight
of looking without clarity.

Because grief is not just absence—
it is distortion.
It bends the light,
smudges the present,
until the world becomes
something I must feel my way through
instead of see.

Frank Hubeny:

Heart, Mind, Vision

Watch and look. Come and see.
Who brought about this mystery?
The mind agrees. The heart’s set free.
Now vision sees what’s there.

The Afterlove voice:

Vision is not only what we see —it is what we sense before it arrives.

Some visions come through the eyes, clear and sharp, shaped by light and distance. Others arrive quietly,as a knowing that settles deep in the body long before it makes sense.

I have learned not to ignore those kinds of visions. The ones that don’t ask for permission. The ones that arrive in dreams,in sudden clarity,in moments where the world feels thin and something beyond it reaches through.

Vision has guided me in ways logic never could. Shown me truths I wasn’t ready to hear. Pulled back curtains I didn’t know were there.

Not all visions are gentle. Some arrive like a shock. A crack in reality. A glimpse you cannot unsee.

But vision is not about fear. It is about awareness. About trusting that what comes through you has a reason to be seen.

We are taught to doubt what we cannot prove. To question what doesn’t fit inside neat explanations.

And yet —some of the truest things arrive without evidence.

Vision is not about seeing everything clearly. It is about learning which truths you are willing to follow.

Cathy Cade:

Spring Vision

They seemed earlier than I’d expected them, but I suppose they do feature in Easter publicity, along with the bunnies.

As well as their mother, a contingent of male ducks were on guard, but I don’t think our pair of swans have even readied their nest for this year’s eggs, so the cob hasn’t yet started laying claim to the whole lake. This one mostly attacks the geese anyway, and pretends not to notice the ducks.

He was equally tardy last year. By the time he had eggs and cygnets to chase the geese away from, the goslings were big enough to look after themselves outside the safety of the lake. There are even more geese this year – probably too many for him to clear the lake of them all. Maybe he’ll give up.

Susan Batten:

On Sight

Where heedless eyes won’t look
and sightless eyes can’t see,
a vision waits for us.
Abide the visionary.
The image he perceives -
the vista then in sight –
a view of realms unseen,
a vision full of light.
Observe the wondrous world,
watch its unfolding scenes,
regard intrinsic worth -
a glimpse of fleeting dreams

Tony:

Vision,
The vision hit me without warning,
like a light forced into the blood,
and everything I thought I was seeing
started to tremble from the inside.
Each vision opened a rift,
the shapes lost their name there,
the colors became wounds
too vivid to be true.
I carried the vision like a fever,
she devoured the real as she went along,
and me, already, I was no longer
than a gaze lost in its own fall.
Then the vision left me — or I fell from it —
and the world, closed again,
had kept something broken …

Mark Fraidenburg:

The Agony in the Darkness

The room is pitch black but the pain remains. Try holding your eyes closed as hard as you can and keep them closed as long as you can do you feel that pain, that is my pain. Darkness lets my eyes relax and the pain subsides but darkness is the only mercy I have left, and even that is a lie.

Because even in the dark, the trigger remains.

People talk about pain like it’s a visitor. It comes, it hurts, it leaves. But when you have a neurological disorder that targets your eyes, pain isn’t a visitor; it’s the landlord. It lives in the sockets. It wraps around the optic nerve like barbed wire and pulls tight with every heartbeat.

I used to love the morning. Now, the sunrise feels like an enemy. The photons hitting my retina don’t translate into “light” or “color” anymore. They translate into voltage. A jagged, screaming voltage that short-circuits my brain. My eyes aren’t windows to the soul; they’re broken shards of glass embedded in my skull.

The doctors call it “complex.” They use words like idiopathic and neuropathy to mask the fact that they don’t understand why my own body has turned against me.

I’m “living” in a void my only comfort is when I sleep the rest of my day is filled with torment.

But the physical agony isn’t the worst part. The worst part is the non-stop talking in my mind. Asking questions, “why did this happen to me? What lesson am I to learn from all this suffering? When will it end? What did I do to deserve this?. The depression seeps in during the quiet times. It sits on my chest and whispers the ugly truth: You are broken.

It’s hard not to feel like the punchline of a cosmic joke.

I think about God sometimes. Not in a pious way, but with a bitter, curdled resentment. I imagine Him, the Great Architect, the Watchmaker. He crafted the human eye with such delicacy—the rods, the cones, the fluidity of movement. He designed the brain to process the wonder of a sunset or the face of a lover.

And then, I look in the mirror, or rather, I grope my way to the bathroom and feel the stubble on my face and I see the absurdity of my existence.

Why give a man eyes if you’re going to wire them to a bomb? Why give him the capacity to appreciate beauty, only to make the act of looking feel like drowning in acid?

It feels like betrayal. It feels like a mockery.

I imagine God watching me stumbling around my house, clutching my head, eyes slammed shut against some unknown pain trigger, and I wonder if He laughs. Is this the test? “Here, take this fragile, wonderful instrument I made, and let me shatter it in your hands. Let me make the very act of opening your eyes a punishment. Let me make you afraid of the light.”

It’s cruel in a way that feels personal. A blind man lives in darkness, but he is adapted to it. I live in a blinding light that only I can see, a neurological storm that no one else can witness. I have the anatomy to see, but the wiring to suffer.

I am trapped in the middle ground. Too functional to be blind, too damaged to see. Too alive to be dead, too broken to live.

I’m dictating this with my eyes closed, making mistakes, asking AI to correct. I can feel the pulse in my left eye throbbing against the eyelid. It’s a drumbeat. A countdown.

I used to pray for a cure. Now, I just pray for the courage to keep the curtains drawn. Because out there, the world is bright, and colorful, and full of people who can look at it without screaming. And out there, God is still playing His games.

I’m done playing. I’ll stay here in the dark, where the only thing that hurts is the memory of the light.

The Bag Lady:

I think it might be poor vision
Thinking of his last decision
To war or not to war
That is the question
“Teach them, teach them all”
His words of wisdom
“I have the power
They have the need
So send the troops
With hastened speed
I need oil and money too
I’ll sacrifice many, including you!”
His speech a warning we must heed
He’s not the only one with wartime seeds.

Jules Pens Some Gems:

sights…

water cuts through rock
vision follows the sharp turns
historic poems
~
blood flows through old bones
vision may fade, memories
linger in the mind

John W. Howell:

She was a vision in white prior to the speeding auto and puddle conflagration.

Annette Rochelle Aben:

Bling Me Sometime

Hoping for a fling
With a sweet young thing
His vision was clear
To hold her so near
But she held out for a ring

Pensitivity101:

I have been wearing glasses since I was at school, although I confess I did not take well to having to wear the Dame Edna lookalikes so squinted a lot.
These days I am quite confident looking out from behind my windows and would not entertain the idea of contacts.

When we were on the boat, I dropped my glasses into the murky depths of the marina.

I had visions of one of the fish wearing them, as it was highly unlikely they could be recovered.

I wear varifocals with a transition prescription reactive to sunlight, and also with a tint, so they are not cheap. I always keep my old pairs in case of an emergency, so I was OK to drive, could see where I was going and what was in the distance.

I marked the decking where I’d dropped them, and went up to the Marina office for help. One of the lads grabbed a fishing net and started to dredge, but without success. He didn’t give up though, and moved away from my marks allowing for drifting as they fell and within minutes pulled up my glasses covered in the most disgusting smelly gunge you can imagine… but minus a fish.

Rall:

the sight of you
i knew you were trouble
if i’d a brain i would have run
a mile
but no
couldn’t resist
i should have known better
my stupid heart still rules my head
sadly

Rohini:

Windows of the Mind

I used to think vision was about clarity.

The click of glasses settling on my nose. The way the world snapped into obedience – tree branches separating from sky, letters standing still instead of trembling. With lenses, the horizon behaved.

Without them, everything softened. Edges bled. Streetlights bloomed into halos like small forgiving suns.

But lately I’ve begun to suspect that blur has its own honesty.

When my father was ill, he spoke of a house by water he was certain he would see again. He described the peeling blue paint, the dock that creaked like an old knee, the smell of minnows and gasoline. There was no such house in our history. We had always lived inland.

Still, he returned to it in detail, as if memory were simply arriving late.

In those last weeks, his physical sight failed him. Faces dissolved. Light fractured. Yet the invisible house grew sharper. He navigated its rooms with confidence. He told me where the windows faced.

I corrected him once. “There is no house.”

He looked at me, not confused, not afraid, and said, “Not for you.”

I have perfect vision with my contacts in. I can read the smallest line on the chart.

But sometimes, when I take them out at night and the world loosens its grip, I think about that blue house by the water.

And I wonder if sight is only one small corridor in a much larger home.

panaecea:

Is it…?

Why do I always
Look up to the sky
And sigh…?
Is it’s limitlessness
That makes me
Feel small?
Is it’s unfathomable depth
That makes me
Feel shallow?
Is it’s sparkling blueness
That reminds me
Of my lack of colour?
Once again I sigh
Deeply…unable
To find the meaning
Of my sigh
The meaning of
My self

Dawgy Daddy Responds:

The fog I was in this morning before the coffee kicked in had me feeling brutal at best. After reading Clive’s post I had a blunt vision of him frantically searching his mail and surfing the internet’s cloud for the clown that hacked his email. A better man than me as I would want to clutch the troll’s throat and squeeze tightly.

michnavs:

Unfinished Goodbyes

i stay up ’till the last light
not night yet, not day;
that moment where everything loosens its grip.

dawn found us like this, remember?
your breath warm against the chill,
the sky just beginning to reveal its colors.
we counted the minutes
as if they were ours to keep.

now the light withdraws in layers,
a slow unthreading;
gold slipping into autumn glow,
a vision of amber fading into ash
the shadows gather beneath my window
like goodbyes i’ve never said.

this hour still belongs to us,
though you are elsewhere
beneath another sky,
or perhaps the same one;
time bending, as it does
for those who have loved deeply.

each fading beam
touches something unfinished in me,
each lengthening shadow
sings your name louder than before.

morning once meant holding on.
now it means learning how to let the light leave
without breaking;
letting you go
without holding on.

tell me –
when the first pale blue opens the day for you,
do you still reach for that moment
we never truly lost?

Suzette B’s Blog:

Wildflowers

vision framing sight
sitting at peace with the now
—fields of wild flowers

Thomas Wikman:

Human Vision Only Detects a Sliver of the EM Spectrum

If you consider wavelength instead of frequency, the electromagnetic spectrum goes from gamma rays at a wavelength of 0.00000000001 meters to long waves at a wavelength of 1,000 meters. Visible light has a wavelength of 0.0000004 meters to 0.0000007 meters. Again, human vision corresponds to only a thin sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum.

For more, and to see some enlightening images, click here.

Lisa A Paul:

To My Children

your faces are always in my inner vision –
for yesterday was a second ago –
and I admit I miss those days
when smiles were missing teeth
and laughter was music bubbling,
when all of you were mine

I didn’t know it then – oh, I’m sure I was told,
but the quick change of hats kept
my head spinning –
but those were the sweetest of times,
every moment a glimpse
into pure love, a nugget of value
so dear that no price could be assigned,
the weight of your dependance
a tender thing, cradled gently against my heart,
a tiny hand wrapped around my finger,
but it was I who was utterly wrapped,
and much too quickly I was freed
when each one let go of me

Now, a moment of eternity,
my vision of you running in the grass
arms stretched out to me
oh lucky me
when you were mine

Sexagenarian Scribbler:

I’m free! No more pain! 

I’ve heard stories before, from other people it had happened to, but to be honest I didn’t believe in any of that nonsense.

When you’re gone, you’re gone, that’s what I say.

Or used to…

Until it happened to me; I saw the white light, the tunnel, then whoosh! I found myself in the most beautiful place, surrounded by angels, singing with the sweetest voices I’d ever heard.

Was this really heaven? Yes it was, and  I was at peace.

I confess I had wanted to die. I’d lost hope of ever getting better.

I’d given up.

I was in a better place now and had no intention of going back down to earth.

God, it seems, had other plans for me.  

The stupid thing was, I wasn’t sure if I believed in him or not, and yet here he was, telling me in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t ready for me yet, it wasn’t my time.

Well I wasn’t happy, but you can’t really argue with the Lord Almighty can you?

So, with another whoosh, down I went. It reminded me of the water slide at Typhoon Lagoon, except that instead of landing in a pool at the bottom, in blazing Florida sunshine, I landed back on the operating table with a mighty thump.

‘We’ve got a pulse.’, I heard someone say. ‘She’s back.’

It was a long haul, but eventually I did get better. Whether God had  a hand in things, I’ll never know. I’d like to think so; yes, I do believe in him now.

I’ve been there, seen him with my own eyes, got the T-Shirt.

And when I do leave this mortal earth, not for a long while now, I hope, I won’t be afraid. I know what’s coming.

It’ll be heaven.

Do you think he’ll remember me?

Roberta Writes:

Medici Fountain in Jardin du Luxembourg

It looms above me

a vision in sandstone,

bronze, and marble

the Medici Fountain

heard before it’s seen

water gushing down wide stairs

into a long tree-shaded basin

in white marble

the sea nymph, Galatea,

and the mortal, Acis

make love

while from behind

the jealous cyclops, Polyphemus

represented in bronze

sneaks upon them

a dead bull across his back

Is Acis’ death a tragedy?

Or is his transformation

into a river spirit

perfect immortalisation?

I wonder

my thoughts flowing

alongside the representations of

the River Rhone and River Seine

observed by Faunus and Diana

Thru Violet’s Lentz:

Sergeant York

“We was all settin’ ‘round the fire night of the turkey shoot, bellies full, when somebody asked me if I’d ever been in trouble with the law. I told ’em, ‘Only once’t- and it weren’t even my fault.’

‘Lemme tell y’all ‘bout the day I pert near got myself locked up for breakin’ into my own house.’

“When I first come back from all that ruckus overseas, old man Levit from the mill hands me and my Gracie a deed to a place in town. Two‑story house. ‘Lectric lights. Doors that shut tighter’n a miser’s fist.”

“Now me an’ my Gracie, we’re holler folk. Growed up in cabins where the doors warn’t never barred ‘cept maybe at night, and even then it was just a board slid acrost it.”

“But my Gracie…”  I leaned over and she give me that little smile she saves for when she knows I’m braggin’ on her – “Lord, she took to them new‑fangled contraptions like a hen to a new nest. Flickin’ them lights on and off, lockin’ and unlockin’ them doors. Said it made her feel ‘proper.’

“I told her she were plenty proper enough for me a’fore ’em”

Gracie pecked my cheek right then, same as she did that day. “Hush, Alvin. Let a woman enjoy her blessings.”

“Well, one mornin’ she heads off to the church house to quilt with the ladies. Now she should’ve been home ‘fore me, but y’all know how them womenfolk get to talkin’ once they settle in.” I grinned at her and she rolled her eyes at me  like she done heard this part a hundred times.

“Anyhow- she locks the front door. Locks the back door. Locks the kitchen window for good measure.”

“Wouldn’t you know it, that’s the one day I come home early. I’m already twitchin’ ‘bout losin’ half a day’s work, when I try the knob. Don’t budge. Try the back door- same story. I’m standin’ there scratchin’ my head like a man tryin’ to remember his own dadgum name.”

‘Gracie,’ I says to nobody in particular, ‘you done locked me outta my own life.’

“Only window she missed was that little transom up over the front door. Barely big enough for a cat, but I figured I’d give it a go. Got my head in, then one arm, then t’other, then my shoulders and that’s when I knew- I was stuck like a cork in a jug. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. Just hangin’ there, half in, half out, wonderin’ how I’m gonna get myself outta this..”

“That’s when them neighbor boys come struttin’ down the street sellin’ them raffle tickets for the turkey shoot. They see my boots a kickin’ and one of ‘em hollers, ‘Hey mister! You best get outta there!’

“I try to turn my head but that frame’s got me pinned. ‘Boys,’ I says, ‘I live here.’

“‘Sure you do,’ one of ‘em calls back, and they tear off for the sheriff.”

“Now this here sheriff’s new in town. City man. Don’t know me from Adam’s housecat.”

‘Sir,’ he says, ‘remove yourself from that window.’

‘I would,’ I tell him, ‘if I could.’

“Might’ve been a whole mess if’n my Gracie hadn’t come walkin’ up right then.”

“She took one look at me stuck like a tick an’ says, ‘Alvin York, what in creation are you doin’?’

‘Tryin’ to get in the house you done locked me out of!’

“She don’t say another word, just marches past the sheriff, unlocks the front door, and goes inside. Next thing I know she’s got hold of me by the coveralls from the inside and gives me one good yank. I popped through that window like a cork shootin’ outta a bottle.”

‘This man,’ she says to the sheriff, ‘belongs to me. And if’n he were breakin’ in, it’s only ‘cause I l had all the keys!’

“Then she kisses my cheek- right there in front of God an’ ever’body- and says, ‘Ain’t you a vision, Alvin York.’ -as she checks me all over like a young’un done fell outta a tree, and says, ‘You sure are lucky I love you.’

“And me, not bein’ much on lovin’ in public, I just give her that look.”

Alvin gives her the same look now- and she blushes just like the schoolgirl she was the day he met her. 

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