For The Sunday Muse Prompt #175, and the shades of that garden it reminds me of:
**
I am dreaming again
of days gone by,
of nights – heavy
with the weight
of solitude – lightened
by the joy of discovery,
a light born of tumult
in an age of innocence.
This is what the
glow-worms in their
flitting feel,
each shimmer
of light a whisper
into the night
to see and be seen.
It struck me the other day that even after a year out here, there are still work colleagues whose faces I have not seen without masks on. Arriving in the middle of the pandemic, masks were required in all public spaces – and rigorously enforced – with more than a few people cited for either having theirs pulled down or not wearing one as they approached the security gates and barriers that dot the landscape. Only when I then see a face without a mask does it register that I have made up the hidden contours, seeing the mask as an integral part of these faces. This brings with it a mild sense of discomfort, stemming from – I think – the fact that even though I have built relationships and friendships with these people, their uncovered faces scream unknown rather than familiar.
Faces apart, I have found myself returning again and again to Carlos Andres Gomez’ poem, Father. I first heard it read by Pádraig Ó Tuama on the excellent Poetry Unbound podcast, its second stanza perfectly encapsulating how I felt on many a visit to the ICU in the aftermath of L’s arrival. Those moments, in which I grasped at everything that I hoped could provide certainty, come back to me in lines such as:
I confessed every wrong
of my life to an empty, over-lit room of steel
and sterile instruments
and
I never wanted
so badly to have been wrong
about anything in my life
This, for me, is part of the allure of poetry. Sometimes, amidst the many lines we read, we can feel seen and known in the words of others.
For H, and The Sunday Muse prompt #170:
**
She lingers like a ghost in the night,
this memory of my mother, framed
by a distant light: the stately stillness
of her furrowed brow, the slight tilt
of her chin catching the light, defiant.
The moment when the lone tear hangs –
perched impossibly as though straining
against the world – comes to me
again and again in a vision of the night,
its lingering like a thread tethering me
in my seasons of incertitude.
A Geek's Life 