Free Response

1. What is a soul?

Is soul the memories that make you who you are?

A place to base yourself when choppy winds arise?

A brief touch, a smiling face, all intertwine to hold you safe.

A shiver, a cuddle, a sigh, a breeze.

Are these the ingredients to a soul?

Or is a soul made as you live?

Always changing,

day to day,

moment to moment?

Speeding onward like a frightened doe?

Each moment a different shape.

A changing, fluid being, constantly fighting for life?

2. Can a soul be broken?

Like a wine glass or a heart?

Will it lay in shattered fragments on the tiled floor?

3. Can you ever really see a soul?

Will you find it near your heart?

Or in your head behind your eyes?

Is it somewhere near your toes,

or like a chemical that flows

through your every pore?

Is it like a shield around you?

Protecting you?

4. Can you be damned by a bad soul?

Will it accumulate sins like a cleaning rag gathers stains?

One dirty spot overlaying another?

Can you have a soul as black as a smoker’s lung?

Or are you born damned or saved?

The first one black, the next radiating white?

So pure it hurts to look.

5. How can you be sure it’s really there?

Not just imagined out of boredom

out of need

out of plaintive midnight crying?

What makes you so sure that your soul looks like mine?