More Than What You See

Are we fleetingly tragic souls?
 
Who barely have the time in the falling of a petal
 
To scratch the soil of this earth, less make a hole
 
Our mark, covered by sodden dirt which settles? 
 
Perhaps not, and here we do own nothing, 
 
But this ineffable moment in our hands
 
But which is only ephemeral as the passing of spring
 
In these thinning fugacious lands 
 
So I will die after this impermanent spring
 
Summer suns burning away my volatile body
 
Into the earthen ground of dust and nothing 
 
Until I will bloom and fail again, trying to show there are more than petals on me. 





-anna sluder 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time present time

I stand on my toes, on a box, on top of a wheeled chair to reach the clock high above me, so that I can cut the whiskers of it off with a pair of gardening scissors. But I hear a knock at the door and it is present standing in the way holding a fish, she hands it to me, so I ask her what to do with it, she tells me she knows that everything the birds say really matters to me that she knows that I count and store every breath that the trees release, in an empty peanut butter jar under my bed, but that I could not remember my first cold water, there was no recollection of my first bright moon. She tells me to hold the fish and decide what it means to me in terms of love, so that I will remember when I leave this room, and when I go to sleep, that I once loved something new, and small, and grey, and something that had scales and looked nothing like me, and I didn’t know where it came from or where it would go from there, but that that di
Read more

Green

I stand in the door wanting nothing, but to be a part of the little house we built of medium-rare earth and broken eggshells and wriggly worms, the bedroom walls are green and there is a single thought tactfully pinned to its center. I remember that everything is quieter in green, and to find solace in the silent ecstasy of the earth’s preeminent color, to excavate and toss away all the colors until we reach the obvious, that green is the walls, and green is earth, and earth reclaims buildings slowly over time with moss then ivy, then as the buildings dilapidate and become their own graves in gardens of decay, it swallows them whole, like swamps and quicksand I thought would play a much larger role in my girlhood battles than they did. I want to crawl inside of the little house we built and play in the dirt with the worms, I want to be reclaimed by terra cotta clay and tunnels made by ants, and if I need to, I’ll send a note to the green,
Read more

Daddy Was Wrong

It's my eleventh birthday And I fall out of a tree And in front of my friends this is what daddy says Stop being such a baby Lace up your boots And put on your big girl pants Get along, scoot! Crying should be something you can't  Don't sob at what I say Grow a spine  I don't care if it's your birthday You'll shut up as long as you're mine But the hybrid of snot and tears on my face Only multiply with each acrimonious word  For the only reason that I fell off of the branches webbed space Was I was saving a baby bird But standing there among all my friends  I don't know why he thinks it's his place To break me instead of to mend And for him to decide that life is a race Because it's not for the survival of the fittest As I cradle the bird in my hands  It's for the gentle rest Of humanity's kindness brand  Life is not meant to be about always being tough We were never meant to be held together perfect Life isn't a fairytale, but it also
Read more