A Poem She Wrote (2015)

There’s something about today.

 

Remember being a little kid?

Remember the feeling of being free and feeling small, yet invincible?

Random feelings of content and happiness, and sometimes the bitter feeling of wrongdoing.

They come back to me again. Is it the associations of childhood that cause this? Is it the world?

 

Look at the sky. See how it deepens and expands as you look. You are directed up.

Why is it so blue? Why is it so vast?

Atoms and chemicals and light refraction, that is the answer. That is the truth.

The blueness of the sky---is it the source or reason for my feelings?

 

But isn’t truth all around us?

Can’t you feel it? I do.

But as I wonder, like a child, I still have so many questions.

I am nondescript. I am a living paradox. I am shallow yet I think.

 

Why do I love the way the sky arches? Why do I feel the earth’s heartbeat?

Oneness with nature does not sound so ridiculous now. I am content. I am fulfilled.

I want to lie in a field and watch the infinite spin.

In this, there is no captivity in my body. There’s something about this world, but only sometimes.

 

But while I watch the sky, hundreds feel war and terror.

While I lay in the field, a boy was shot, a child’s sad eyes gaze up from a tabloid, a old man dies of starvation, a woman is raped.

While I soar with the universe, wrapped up in my own uniqueness,

Things that set some apart from others have become a death sentence.

Is their reality deeper than mine? Do their experiences wash mine of meaning?

 

I am lucky. I have the freedom to think these thoughts.

So do they. But in the horror of death, violence and hunger and physical needs, that which defines humanity is less important.

 They will never be given the chance to live like me.  The little children will not have these memories to think about. 

Their wonder is stolen. I am lucky and they are not. Who decides these things?

 

There’s something about today that makes me think and feel this way. I am Pilate. But I am trying to open my mind.

and i am lucky