Journal

I’ll admit it, this week’s poem, Journal, is a bit of an unusual lyric. Did you ever think, driving along, that the way the sun curves over the horizon, just pinking in the sky as it rises, makes the sky look like the curved lid of a terrarium or the bowl of a snow globe? I had that feeling one morning driving to work. As if the earth was flat and the bowl of the sky curved over it.

For just a second there, the movie The Truman Show came to mind. It suddenly seemed entirely possible that we could all be living inside a false world.  Television set, terrarium, a strange experiment put together by an alien race, whatever the reason. The trees I was driving past might be the decorations put inside our little snow globe, to make it seem more “real”.

Perhaps that was the way mankind felt about the sky overhead before discoverers circumnavigated the globe. Or even after that, but before we had pictures of Earth from the vantage of outer space, picture thst show we are not surrounded by an alien cage of some kind.

I can’t tell you if this thought came to me because of a trick of the light, or if it was just a passing idea that hit me, or if it was a leftover from overhearing some episode of Ancient Aliens the evening before. I tried to capture the light that triggered the original thoughts for me with my cellphone, but the phone doesn’t do it justice. You can see those photos in my original post on this subject. In any case, here’s the poem itself.

Journal

Pink is shy today. Creeps more carefully
than needed to peek over the horizon’s table.
Blushes slightly, wavelength just at the edge
of sight. Trees, upturned arms empty,
won’t accommodate such reticence. There’s
no name for the discomforting color
one would think the sun had long outgrown.

The impulse: always to wait concealed.
Behind a fringe of leaves. Back of the dairy.
Through closed windows: no sound. Even a sliver
of glass uncovered by blackout shades
is enough to spy on what doesn’t mind being seen.
Even, knowing that seeing changes nothing.

 

If you enjoyed Journal

You can read more of my work on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.  Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.  

If you’d like to see pictures of where I’ve been or what I’ve been up to lately, easiest is to follow me on Instagram, @minervatma. You can also see my Instagram feed here on my site, if you prefer not to spend time on Instagram itself.

Journal originally appeared in the online magazine Shot Glass Journal, Issue 21, January 2017.

Comments welcome, as always. Have a great week, and look for another poem next Monday.