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 |
SoFloPoJo
SoFloPoJo - South Florida Poetry Journal & Witchery, the place for Epoems Copyright © 2016-2025