Veronica Tucker

On the Fifth Day, the Sky Refused to Translate

The clouds gathered in unreadable script,
half prayer, half static.
Some said it looked like smoke.
Others, a map with no roads.

The birds did not return
to their usual chorus.
They circled instead,
wings twitching with a grammar
we could not parse.

Light struck the hillside
but cast no shadow.
Even the sun
seemed uncertain
what time meant.

In the city, someone
drew clocks on cardboard
and held them up
like protest signs.
The hours slipped off
the edges of noon.

We asked the sky
for a sign
but it held its silence
the way a locked door
holds everything
we are not ready to know.

And so we named the silence
weather,
named the forgetting
a kind of progress,
called the end
something else
entirely.

Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician based in New Hampshire. Her writing draws from her experiences in medicine and everyday life, often exploring themes of uncertainty, memory, and meaning. Her poems appear in redrosethorns, Eunoia Review, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and others. She is especially interested in poetry that leans into ambiguity and resists easy resolution.