Claire Prescott, originally from Taunton, Somerset, UK, and now happily rooted in Toronto, Canada, is a youthful, reflective 50-year-old rediscovering herself after several challenging years. A water-loving Rambler and passionate swimmer, she’s kind, caring, and always striving to trust her intuition a little more each day.
There are moments in life when a single sentence can split your world in two. Termination does that—it arrives without warning, hits without mercy, and leaves you standing in the wreckage of words you never asked to hear. Some words don’t just land—they echo, distort, and linger long after they’re spoken. In that instant, clarity fractures into confusion, and all that remains is the first blow—the sentence that changed everything. After that, it’s just noise: a blur of explanations and justifications that don’t quite register because your mind is already spiraling.
Losing a job isn’t just losing work. It’s losing rhythm, identity, security, and the version of yourself you thought you were building. It’s the silence afterward that cuts the deepest—the space where you expect comfort, clarity, or even outrage on your behalf, but instead you’re left alone with the echo of those words. This poem lives in that disorienting space between hearing and understanding, between impact and meaning, where language has the power to wound and reshape at the same time.
It is born from shock, confusion, and frustration—but also from the quiet realization that even in isolation, there is a complex human side to silence. When the right words don’t come, it doesn’t always mean no one cares. Sometimes, it simply means no one knows what to say.
And so, this piece becomes an attempt to sit inside that chaos—to make sense of the fragments, and to give voice to what it feels like to gather yourself from the rubble of someone else’s decision.
Words That You Hear
Words that you hear
Have no recollection
Only fear.
Debilitating just like when you look right into the sun
The brightness brings about squinting which ain’t much fun
Those words though bring tears with such a strong flow
Such a strong flow you lose all your glow.
Frustration
What did those words say
Only memory it happened
But not in which way
Hang on that’s not right
I’m well aware of the way they came
Only the first sentence is all I could hear
A muddled mess of words lost in the chaos of shock
Frustration, those words mean so much
but right now I feel like I’m fucked!
Words that you hear
Alter your world
Some for the better
Some so bold
That they break your world
Words that you hear
Bring change to oneself
You either embrace it
And go with the flow.
Or you break down
Because those words told you to do so.
Words that you hear
bring chaos to your life
bring chaos to the lives of your loved ones
family & friends but where are they
nobody knows.
Silence when you want to hear words
Words of support
Words of support that just aren’t there
Those words aren’t there – does this mean nobody cares?
Nobody cares – this simply isn’t true
Put yourself in their shoes
What would you do?
What do you say – the right thing, the wrong thing
Nobody knows
Words that have meaning cause pain then to flow.
READ MORE > Her Story, Rambler Cafe Blog
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