Lola Haskins    Gainesville    (C.M. Clark)
The Discovery

On walking, in my seventies, down a leafy street
behind two women in their early forties who 
are chatting to each other as companionably 
as birds on a limb, and having thought, with 
happy anticipation, ah, I'll be their age soon!
it occurs to me that I've lost my mind-- but 
just then the clouds evanesce and light pours 
through the oaks and ash, to form lace on 
the pavement lovely enough to be sewn 
into dresses, and I see that time is as 
random as the patterns the sun makes on 
any given day as it filters through leaves, 
and as illusory as a baby being born, and 
as strange as the years of our lives that
go by without returning, and as equal as 
the one friend's auburn hair and the red leaf 
she steps over, which the wind has abandoned 
for love of her.  And now, having finally 
seen that the world is every minute new, 
I realize that I'm only a little younger than 
those women after all, and I step between 
them, and we speak as we walk, and by 
the time we part, each of us in her own way 
has told the others how lucky she is, 
to have been alive in such a beautiful place.


Originally published in Rattle 
Included in Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press), September 2023