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