Stone Soup Servings is a regular series for Oddball Magazine that features upcoming performers at Stone Soup Poetry, the long-running spoken word venue in the Boston area that has partnered with Oddball Magazine. Stone Soup Poetry now meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery’s new location at 541 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square Cambridge, Massachusetts. The open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m.

On November 24, Stone Soup, we say goodbye before the holiday break, but not before saying hello to Tru Kwene making her debut Stone Soup feature. Read her poem today and be in the audience on Monday.

 

Until Forever Comes

Never say never.
No, you can say never.
Just never ever say forever because tomorrow just doesn’t come
because I wished it would
Because I wished it would!
She told me she’d never forever live, but she promised to forever
love me.
Well Nana, now that you’re gone where does our love meet?
You see I don’t quite get how now our every interaction is me
begging you for your attention.
You promised to love me but you’re just not listening…
standing in my mother’s kitchen adjacent to the room you now live
in, in
eyes locked on your position…
I wonder…
can you feel the love that I’m giving?
Why isn’t it enough to make you live again?
Don’t you know that I need you?
That years later I still grieve you and sitting in this place I hate to
see you in…
I don’t feel the love.
Our forever ended June 18, 2011 when you did,
and I love you,
knowing you’d never willingly choose this, but I wish you’d never
said forever.
Or better yet, I wish you’d taught me what broken promises of forever meant.
How much they hurt in the present when you realize forever can
never be in the present tense.
But you said forever and
in that moment this pain takes my breath away
I just can’t seem to see forever as relevant.
Every shut eye ain’t sleep, so I imagine you waking in heaven then.
Truly heaven sent.
And every goodbye isn’t gone so I know that you’re somewhere
near because that’s what you said it’d be when I needed you.
I need those words to be true because everything that I once seen
in you dims a little because I can’t be with you.
Beautiful memories I’d sacrifice just to see you make it through
this.
Because the truth is no story that I ever tell could give justice to
who you really are. Or who you really were…
Who I one day hope to be.
I hope you live on through those pieces you left broke in me
And hopefully you’ll be there when I cross over,
My Old Lady,
And we could be Old Ladies together.
And only then will I know what it is like to exist in forever.