NaPoWriMo Day 29 – After the Sirens, After the Years

The clock turns, but it never truly resets. It only folds time—past into present, memory into breath.

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt draws inspiration from Jennifer Moxley and her poem After Turning the Clocks Back, where the present moment is stitched carefully to the past. The task is simple in structure but heavy in spirit: take the life you live now and lay it beside the life you once carried. Let them speak to each other. Let them haunt each other.

There’s something honest—almost sacred—about that kind of reflection. The past doesn’t disappear. It lingers in the way we hold a cup, in the quiet between thoughts, in the echoes we pretend not to hear.

This poem, “After the Sirens, After the Years,” lives in that space.

It reaches back into a life once ruled by urgency—sirens, flashing lights, the weight of seconds—and places it against a present shaped by stillness, reflection, and the long work of understanding. It’s not just a comparison; it’s a reckoning. A recognition that the man who once ran toward chaos still exists, somewhere beneath the quieter rhythms of today.

There’s a shift here—from motion to stillness, from reaction to reflection—but not a clean break. The past lingers. It always does. And maybe that’s the truth beneath the poem: we don’t outgrow who we were—we learn how to sit with him.

🚑➡️🕯️
From sirens to silence.
From chaos to contemplation.
From survival to meaning.

After the Sirens, After the Years

The coffee hums low in a quiet kitchen,
no radio chatter, no boots by the door—
just morning light pooling on unpaid bills.

Once, my hands knew the weight of urgency,
latex snapping tight, breath counting down seconds,
sirens carving red veins through the dark.

Now I measure time in softer things—
the slow drip of thought, the turn of a page,
a pen dragging truth from old scars.

Back then, the night had teeth and I fed it,
running toward endings no one could outrun,
learning the language of loss in flashing lights.

Now the silence speaks, and I listen—
to ghosts that sit like old friends at the table,
to the man I was, still knocking somewhere inside.