Poetry in motion...

This poem represents my response to "where is my life going?" questions--you know, the ones you don't always share with your fellow sojourners, who are like you, "pursuing their destinies in God," and pretending to know where it is all headed! Though it hasn't received any rave reviews from my immediate acquaintances, I still feel it has something to say--enough so that I post it here bravely! It is a prayer with a celebration at the end...which is, now that I think about it, what all of our lives should be...



Collide-a-scopic

All I see is broken glass—
Tangled, mangled shards of broken dreams,
Each one destined for greatness,
But now each one
Lying mockingly at my feet,
Declaring loss.

The red bits cry the loudest:
They were proudly forged in the heat of ambition:
Days when teachers and professors said,
“You could really make it if you try…”

The blue bits echo back a lament of loftier imaginings:
Of arts and expressions of the “inner life.”
Like ocean waves they speak
Of a vast unknown that is reachable
Only by me…

The green fragments—they seem the sharpest—accuse me unashamed.
“Humility is the way,” they say,
“Be small, be quiet, content with obscurity
And stop wanting what you can’t have in life.
The best you can hope for is no trauma, no drama and no frills.”
(I really hate those bits.)

I do see gold sparkling pebbles strewn throughout the wreckage,
Moments of real transcendent glory, but not exactly my own;
Heaven kissed me then and I was alive.
But they aren’t even proper shapes.
No one could build with them.

No, I don’t see a pattern when I look around me.
I only see what once was and what I wanted it to be—sadly.

And you—you dare me to come “as I am”?
I want to shout, “WAIT A MINUTE!!!”
This glass, these shreds, these nothings that wanted to be something—
These are me!
How can I come without them?
So you’ll have to wait until I figure out how to pick them up and bring them:
It’s a slow process because I keep getting cut…

But you won’t wait—why are you like that—insistent and intense?

Do you know something that I don’t know, being above me as you are?
What’s that? It’s not the glass but the ground you are pointing to?
Could it be that I am standing, living, dancing on a stage
That in your hands and under light brighter than my own
On purpose turns yielding patterns that make the broken glass dance—
Mirrors reflecting images that make pieces whole and reinterpret the world—
Chaos producing order and this moment,
This arrangement,
This turn of the circle
Producing a vision never seen before?

Then I realize the joke is on me (but how many others still don’t see it).
All anyone gets is the bits—
No one gets whole vases or goblets or prisms;
No perfect globes or spherical wonders, no crystal figurines.
The pieces unite to amplify the light
And the vision formed is the whole point—
Not second best, not salvaged because it’s all that is left of a once-bright future.

I dance then on the broken glass stage and realize I don’t have to bring it to you—
You’re all around it.
When I heard you say, “Come,” and did my bloody effort-filled exercise in futility,
(That has gone on now for years)
All you really meant was, “Relax,”
And all you really wanted was to dance.


--by Perrianne Brownback