My Horizon
Free Verse Poem
It is key to understanding this entrapment- this sentence within the fleshy jail of mortality- to realize that we cannot change the bars or the walls, or the height from the floor of the small, solitary window in the corner. We cannot choose whether it is placed on the east or the west side, and so some of us are condemned to continually and gloomily watch the sun set, while others seem to be perpetually and cheerily greeting the morning.
My twilight view is reflected in the colors of my fancies: purple, blue, pink; dusky tones that evoke nostalgia, reflection, melancholy. My western window provides the backdrop for my solitary musings that overflow into these lines.
I have attempted to see the sunrise. Awoken at preternatural hours within my soul to strain my eyes from the farthest angle of the cold sill, only to cause peripheral ache and weary darkness to send me, frustrated, back to bed.
And so acceptance comes. I decorate my cell with wildly drawn aspects; I deck the unbending casement with blousy linen, and I drink in the spectacle of the sinking solar sphere with greater and greater attention to its details. I learn what its waning radiance has to teach, that I may perhaps mold the lessons into scraps of wisdom that offer comforts, however rudimentary, to the other inmates along my horizontal plane, and education to our neighbors on the eastern wing.
Sunset on this day’s dream. That I may dream a new one tomorrow.
This scenario, picturesque as it may seem, often leads to dark days. And the entrapment seems unbearable. When I imagine that the cell is so far inferior to those around it, that it should be energetically razed and the space used as a gardenbox for the other inmates.
It is a misery, when I have heaps of colored construction papers blossoms on table and chair, to realize that I can only toss them out helplessly between the barely reachable bars, and slowly at that. Most days, it takes all my strength just to fold the paper and affix the stems whose paper thorns cut my fingertips and cause me to curse as I fashion the ephemeral foliage.
more by VK LYNNE
Photograph by David Di Veroli
