Even Prompter

Candlelight

Candlelight

Oh, candlelight,
bright speck rigid upright in the draughtless dark,
hero of a million romantic dinners,
saviour in a multitude of power cuts,
icon of an eerie, nightmare Halloween,
beacon of a hundred Scrooges led to bed,
trendy, fat and flavoured emblem of the New Age,
so, even now, your dated, homely essence
haunts our modern dreams of night,
and I am left without inspiration
on some new, unremarked aspect of your being.
‘Cept maybe this, a sudden thought,
olfactory memory to the rescue,
as I terminate your tiny flame -
and there it is, so familiar to us all,
that burnt smell of the smoke that is your death.


Line count: 16
Free verse
For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 27 2023
Prompt: Candlelight.