POETREE

Neither free verse nor plain language are what I'd call strengths of mine, but despite that-- or perhaps, because of it!-- this was an enlightening exercise.

I might attempt more later.


"This is what the future looks like,"
he said, sweeping his hand to take it all in,
then clenching it, as if he could ball the future
within his glove, as if he could hold it.
It was too big for me to hold.
The enormity-- that double-edged word
meaning both vast and awful--
of the vista around me was beyond
the imagination of a child.

The future looked like metal,
the slick sleek gleam of a new-built city
factory made and measured;
but it smelled like old gunked-up,
junked-up machines, and the dust
his boots stirred up on the clanging catwalk.
I was less than impressed--

But then I turned, and saw.
Through glass, cold muffling glass
that dulled emotions and the chance for contact
(though nothing, even now, can dull the shine of her eyes)
she stared, blue gaze luminous, huge
as if it flooded up
with all the light and vastness
my corpse-shell body
could not contain.

My eyes that same, unnatural blue,
and yet they could not swallow her strange oceans
or the outpouring, equal to the inpouring,
the questions that hurtled round that mind's racetrack;
she asked, without asking, more questions
than anyone,
a mirror of the questions I would never ask,
am still finding courage to ask myself
thirty years from then.

So much for the future.