Today's poem is by Meredith Stricker

The Thin Line
       

Every morning opening the newspaper, I am faced
with the thin line that divides disaster and deprivation
from a world of luminous wealth. Tuesday, January 29th,
for instance, bodies, many of them children, lie on the ground
They drowned in the canal trying to escape a weapons depot fire
and explosion in Lagos. Their heads are twisted in straw and dust
near the feet of on-lookers whose cries we cannot hear

And across two thin-as-breath lines: a cocktail shaker
about the same size as a body in the foreground
gleams quietly for $950 in stenciled silver
reflecting nothing in its lucent surface

I have learned to compartmentalize, to mentalize
I can tell the silver shaker is beautiful, in its way, but to see
it glisten there separately, something strange has to happen
to my sight

There are bodies on the ground, there is a pristine cocktail shaker
and two infinitely thin, poignant lines. The cocktail shaker
levitates to the foreground. It is untouched by the chaos, the loss
the weeping, the wet bodies, the smoldering munitions
Heaven would restore our sight. Earthly paradise
would dissolve the lines

Heaven is not a gated community. Silver is covered
with mud. Mud is covered with silver. The wounded
are cared for and made whole. The dead are washed
and mourned. We would leave nothing out
Not one atom of existence outcast

This is no dream

"Parts of the canal were blanketed with hyacinths.
A woman's pink shoe, a baby's slipper and a bright orange
and red skirt floated among the plants."

This is earth. This is paradise—how one grain of paradise
looks on a day in January. We are its eyes

notes: quotation from: New York Times, February, 2002

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Copyright © 2023 Meredith Stricker All rights reserved
from Rewild
Tupelo Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission