Friday, June 2, 2017

sometimes we lift a candle

By the time you're reading this, we'll be marching our black-robed selves into Baccalaureate.  It's a lovely thing (I guess) that my life is as fresh as a student's with the wondering of "what's next? how will the ensuing scene unfold?"

Resumes are wafting out and possibilities are being tossed around~it's little wonder that there are moments I feel dizzy.  Enjoy this poem for this last Friday of the school year and my transition.

a little magic on today's walk
The future that never happens
is the one that makes us do
what we do while we are waiting
for what is never going to come
to take us away from the past,
which is a country that we do not
know anymore, where the language
is strange, only almost familiar.
Years not only go by, they carry us
into places where we meet the dragons,
the gorgons, the pack of wolves
circling with their sharp teeth, and
sometimes we lift a candle, sometimes curse.
Like scarecrows, we scare a bird or two.
We know what we are and are not.
But still we keep on dreaming, warming
our hands over the fire in that cottage
at the end of the road—where everything
is prepared for us, and someone we
never met has departed only minutes ago.

"A Dream of the Future" by Joyce Sutphen from The Green House. © Salmon Poetry, 2017. 


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