The Walls of This Room Are Glass
("Be more sacred
than scared.”—cin salach)
Light
streams in, golden by day, cool blue moonlight at night.
The
Lodger sees what has come before, searches for what is to come.
Like
a mind, the room observes, grieves, rejoices, converses with itself,
dissecting
its past, trembling in future-fear. The Lodger opens a lidded basket.
Ethiopia’s
blossom-scented night flows around her, takes her
back
to the Lucy girl, apelike in age-old beauty. Stillness at the center,
chaos
swirls around the walls, her mind, her room a sanctuary
from
the world’s madness. After the storm, scudding white clouds,
short-cropped
green grass, a single ink-black raven feather upright,
still
wind-buffeted, signals from the middle of a field. A sign of something.
The
mind wonders what it can mean, so stalwart, so definite, its outline
black
against green, wind against glass, sun’s bright glare across the mind.
The
Lodger sees ancient fingers’ subtle wielding of the stylus,
press
into soft clay, words so secret the stone tablet will not yield
its
cuneiform mysteries to another mind for centuries. Yes, she sees
this
as if she holds it in her own hand, as if she lived then, and now,
again
in the future glass. The Lodger has a typewriter on which
she
writes her desperate verse, confesses her fears, but a typo
changes
a word, changes her world to “I am so sacred.”
No
longer afraid, she takes a bouquet of red rose hope
to
her father on his cancer bed in a small bronze cowboy-boot
vase
now empty on the glass shelf near her glass desk,
her
glass typewriter, her glass mind, golden in the light.
 |
| Sharon Darrow |
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