Good morning (or evening, or ever-after),
Sometimes I send you poems I’ve written here, because they tell me that’s originally what Substack was for. Incidentally, creation too. Was/is for poetry, that is. Though, Capital-P poetry. Which is not limited to written poetry. The below, though, is just that: written poetry.
May you be uplifted and uplift others!
S
Little Blue Dot
by Shannan Mann
My favourite mountain is a volcano. The way it just blows up whenever it’s had enough. When asked my influences, I say Eyjafjalla. Though I am not hiding from anyone, I am also not making myself any easier to find. Smog has made the stars obsolete. No one laments Orion or Andromeda. Rivers are frothing tar, but since we are looking at them through Instagram filters, they look pretty cool. Really, the planet is falling apart. As am I. Most likely you too. Isn’t it right, then, that our home mirrors our cracks? How cruel the gavel of time: I melt at the sight of hummingbirds and blue whales but they go on dissolving and unforming, faster than ever before. Yet sometimes I admit I’m seized by the guitar strings of wind on an unnaturally snowless winter morning. Spying birds migrating away to warmer mountains, I can almost fool myself that there is such a place for me too. Not heaven, but the ladder to it. Not God, but a glimmer of the Self mustanging along pastures, wild, rough light of the unified theory of the multiverse. In other words, an impossibility, like earth.
First published in The Missouri Review as Poem of the Week (Nov 25, 2024)
Sad and hopeful, Shannan. Thank you for this. There is a place. For now, it is here, still, despite losses, so much beauty, tenderness, touch, smell, taste, hear--presence. These bodies are a burden, but without them, there is no laughter. Without them, there is love, but no ability to feel it. Courage.
I too have been lost in rumination of decay and trying to pan for what’s left of the gold. I’ve found some treasure in the spirit of infinity, of what beauty comes next, of what’s beyond our control.