New Poem - "Not So Much Afraid of the Dark as In Awe of It"
Not So Much Afraid of the Dark as In Awe of It
Either the late afternoon sky is pitch black,
ominously, as though there are only thunderclouds
everywhere and nothing else, no, not even light,
or you are walking around in the middle of the night
carrying a box of salt to God only knows where.
The raindrops are tears of white paint, little flecks
on the broad, speechless cheek of the sky.
The creator of this world you live in,
as far as the eye can see, didn’t seem
to deem it necessary to make houses, or trees.
You stand before the barest of backgrounds;
you, your umbrella, and your salt
the only things with dimensions;
the ground is the sea, and the sea is the sky.
Even a bolt of lightning a mile or so behind you
would make this apparition of you less unsettling.
As you are, you are a dream, essentially: carefree
and without any sense of distance or place,
just an afternoon stroll in some empty town;
the middle of some nowhere someone’s colored
perfectly within the lines, no undulating hills
rolling past you; look how spotless your galoshes are.
The sight of you in the rain with your umbrella
and your box of salt compels one to wonder
if this is the one and only moment in your life.
Is this one still frame all there is to you?
Maybe this is the reason for your smile;
you understand that this is all the time you have
so it doesn’t matter that there will always be a storm coming;
it doesn’t matter that you are only ever asked to go get some more salt
at 3 in the morning when you should be safely at home in bed.
Spill your salt for miles; it never runs out.
What would happen if for just for, say, an hour,
your creator hung a Sun in your world, just stuck it there,
so much light shining, making the rain come to a stop
and you had to fold up that umbrella and cover your eyes?
What if, for once, in addition to the rain, there were other things in the sky
and also all around you: trees and lanes to walk upon,
flowers at your feet and houses with windows and doors?
When the Sun shines, sometimes it blinds,
and when it rains, it pours.
- Monday, March 02, 2009 by Rich Boucher