Any sense of ambition has evaporated

in the searing heat

and I simply sit, surrendered,

and watch versions of reality

pass before me like actors on a stage.

There’s the me who skates across

life’s icy veneer:

doing the things,

checking the boxes,

collecting my pay.

And there: the self

who hikes the ocean floor.

And now there is the one

whose eyes sting,

whose throat tightens,

because the song sparrow’s song is

so sweet that it hurts.

He perches on a shepherd’s crook –

and as he sings,

I wonder what it might be like

to be a bird inside an egg:

aware of light, heat, sound,

yet simultaneously separate.

My sense of the future,

normally such a fixture,

seems, just now, to have abandoned me;

against a backdrop of losses,

I can only rest.

What is the alternative but

to believe that there’ll be something

to reclaim, to rebuild –

to rest against that as against

the curved inner surface of

my own imagined shell.

Just what shape this

incubating self will take

I don’t yet know.

I can only wait –

for the instinct to turn,

to peck open a

network of cracks,

to flex and press

against the confines

until I tumble through;

the messy process

of being born.

Only this time, it seems,

I’m giving birth to myself.

 

– As I write, the whole world is caught in the grip of a heat wave.

But it still feels good to create (even if this particular creation is written in minor key).

 

Photo by FelixMittermeier from Pixabay