Contrary to all appearances, I have not given up my 100 Themes Challenge, even though I started it in 2015 and I’m not even halfway through. I WILL GET THERE EVENTUALLY.
Tonight (December 2 going into December 3), I wrote a poem for the first time in months. And the poem before that had been the first in months. And the poem before that…well, you get the picture. My poetic muse has been very quiet lately, but sometimes she surprises me, and I am always touched and grateful when she does.
This time, wonder of wonders, I feel that I can actually share the resulting poem. The one-word theme for this one was
DIE
Youch. To be fair, I could have interpreted this as one-half of a pair of dice, or even as something industrial, but I had already started a poem based on another line of thought, and the literal verb sense of this word was the one that helped me finish it.
So here we go…my first new poem in a long while.
And here is a TikTok of me reading it. 🙂
Snap a Photo
Snap a photo of the seed
as it falls, before the earth
envelops it, develops it
in her darkroom while it dreams
of blossoms blazing color.
Snap a photo of me
unmoored, unmoving on the futon
of my dim apartment, buried
in faded blankets and breathing,
only breathing.
Your camera will pronounce me dead.
I am, I guess. A kind of dead.
A dreamer.
I don’t know how to live
in a world like this, a photograph
desaturated by some demonic edit
of half-truths, faithlessness,
and worst of all, indifference.
Neither can I walk
the oversaturated streets
of all the light and sound
we cast to lie
about the darkness.
How can I live
with memories of glimpses—
the living colors
of the real,
the purest air
of what we know is true—
yet see and breathe
the daily blurs and hard-edged lights
that we call real? I’m dreaming.
You are, too.
We’ll wake, someday,
if you don’t know.
But snap a photo
of this death, and maybe
if you develop it in darkness
the colors, proving true, will show
the visions we call dreams,
the snapshots of the real,
the only world I understand.
