Originally posted August 7th, 2011
By Michael Konik
When you walk into a room, the dining room let’s say for the sake of useful metaphor, her solitude is silent, screaming mutely and crying in the quiet.
The loneliness of the orchid.
The stillness of the table. The gentle droop, a swan’s neck, a dancer’s bow to the enveloping sound of love.
Cursed with wakefulness, the flowers cannot sleep. The talking goes on and then some more, shuffling the proper order of things. Renovating the piquant plan that our unseen hand once imagined in a fever fit. Ceaselessly yearning for light and the enveloping sound of love.
We can’t know her any more than ourselves. She’s white and frail and open, vulnerable to cold and cruelty. Her language is a mystery.
We can feel her. She is lonely.
You had no sister, only promises. And when the end came, messy and unhappy and not at all . . . → Read More: Poem: The Loneliness of the Orchid
Originally posted August 30th, 2009
By Michael Konik
Explain if you’re able to a little girl no older than you were when you discovered that pets don’t live forever (or grandmas, or daddies) that no one will die tonight in this speeding metal tube filled with people who don’t look or smell or sound like her family but who, like her family, have mothers and father and dogs and cats who also will not live forever.
Physics and math are elegant and unimpeachable, but they’re comically unconvincing
to a mind that is still accepting Bible stories
and fairy tales about princesses in castles.
Tell her that the air is water and that we are all swimming through it, and when she wonders why everything won’t sink to the bottom, as it seems to do in the ocean and her neighbor Ellie’s pool, try to think fast.
You said you couldn’t wait for me to . . . → Read More: Poem: Flying
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