“Death doesn’t have to be scary,”
she said, squeezing
the old man’s hand,
wiping his brow.
“Just think of it like a rest stop
on the road to
your permanent
Heavenly home.”
His eyes blinked shut, his chest collapsed.
His heart flatlined.
But his smile just
kept on growing.
(A minute poem is composed of 60 syllables split between three stanzas. The four lines of each stanza should have a syllable count of 8/4/4/4. Traditional minute poems are written in iambic pentameter using the rhyme scheme of aabb, ccdd, eeff. This was way too difficult for me to compose in just 60 minutes, so I improvised by eliminating both the rhyme and meter requirements, resulting in my “nontraditional” knockoff version above.)
This made me the tears flow. So beautiful and full of truth!