________________________________________________________________
The Discovery
On walking, in my seventies, down a leafy street
behind two women in their early forties who
are chatting to each other as companionably
as birds on a limb, and having thought, with
happy anticipation, ah, I’ll be their age soon!
it occurs to me that I’ve lost my mind—but
just then the clouds evanesce and light pours
through the oaks and ash, to form lace on
the pavement lovely enough to be sewn
into dresses, and I see that time is as
random as the patterns the sun makes on
any given day as it filters through leaves,
and as illusory as a baby being born, and
as strange as the years of our lives that
go by without returning, and as equal as
the one friend’s auburn hair and the red leaf
she steps over, which the wind has abandoned
for love of her. And now, having finally
seen that the world is every minute new,
I realize that I’m only a little younger than
those women after all, and I step between
them, and we speak as we walk, and by
the time we part, each of us in her own way
has told the others how lucky she is,
to have been alive in such a beautiful place.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Lola Haskins has published 14 books of poetry and three of nonfiction. Her work has appeared widely in magazines and been broadcast on the BBC and NPR. Her latest collection, Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press 2023), was named Poetry Book of the Year by Southern Literary Review, and was a Hoffer Grand Prize finalist. The one before that, Asylum (University of Pittsburgh, 2019), was featured in the New York Times Magazine and will shortly be featured in The John Clare Journal. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, two Florida Book Awards, narrative poetry prizes from Southern Poetry Review and New England Poetry Review, a Florida’s Eden prize for environmental writing, and the Emily Dickinson prize from Poetry Society of America.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees (1889), Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Go to Source
Author: Terence Winch
