Originally, I wasn't going to post one of my own poems in this series, but I've changed my mind and am posting a piece from Tonguefire that hasn't appeared anywhere else.
Pedestrian
Someone was standing in the middle of the road.
She stood astride it, just beyond
the blind spot on a sharp, countryside bend,
so hidden that I nearly ran her over.
At first, she seemed an ordinary figure
—jeans, a fitted t-shirt, long brown hair—
but for the confidence with which she stood
where any car would slam straight into her.
Almost as soon as we jerked to a halt
and I got out the car to remonstrate,
the space around her ruptured
with the opening of wings
as colourful as the flocks of paradise.
She stretched her hand towards me, said
I know you’ll take good care of it and poured
from her palm into mine a sleeping child,
scarcely the size of a nut and sprouting
from its belly a shoot topped off by a tiny leaf.
I tried to ask the obvious questions, but she
folded herself from our vision.
I felt her gift stir slightly, though it slept
as soundly as it does now in my hand.
How can I drive on with this entrusted to me?
I’m rooted here, keeping watch
on the growth of what is planted in my palm—
this difficult, unasked-for joy.
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2 comments:
Very Thumbelina..I like it.
I enjoyed this piece. It's poetic in the true sense of the word. Were it formatted as a single paragraph it would work perfectly well but I'd still call it a prose pose as opposed to a piece of flash fiction. I read the piece as allegorical myself, like a fable but without the neat moral at the end.
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