Life,
with time,
gets harder.
Problems arrive
becoming inchmeal,
more complex. So it goes.
Some say the higher goal is
to face it with grace. Perhaps so.
What other choice do you really have?
A car is careening off a cliff,
you know what's going to happen.
There are so few outcomes if
a car is careening off a cliff.
Heaven doesn't open, no angels swift,
so despair cannot be a sin when
a car is careening off a cliff.
You know what's going to happen.
"A woman is waiting
I do not know how much longer she must attend
In silence to the memory of water.
My own hands are empty
There is nothing to hold."
#TodaysPoem#poetry@poetry
Prescription for Water by Jiameng Xu
collected in The Covid Journals (2023 University of Alberta Press)
edited by Shane Neilson, Sarah Fraser and Arundhati Dhara https://tinyurl.com/4s3mhuzf
I don't understand how those who show
no empathy would somehow think
that it should be extended
to them, as if we had
not been noticing.
As if a tree
doesn't bear
its own
fruit.
"The colours of their middle-age
are a midsummer tease, matching
hues, bluing into blue into bluish-
white in the distance. So here we are
too, a gallery of gazes
looking on these affairs—easy
chairs on the veranda."