ONE PLACEA small child
Lying and looking at crayon cloud pictures
Wonders to the sky:
Why is there death?
Why must one person live to be a hundred,
While another never lives at all?
And who decided who must live
And who will never see the light of day
Or whose candle must extinguish before it is nearly burnt?
And Sky...
How big is a place?
And tell me, if you can, who decides where one place begins and
another ends?
Are there places inside us?
Are the inside of our eyelids and our faces places?
If I was sitting in a place
Say a sprawling city
Where buildings reflect light that scatters on my skin
And the shadows transgress my flesh to make me shiver...
Am I a part of that place?
And if I grow up, and fall in love,
With a person or a place and the person is taken away, say,
To another place
Are they still a part of the first place
The very first place where we were, because
Who decides where one place ends and another,
Somewhere,
Begins?
The sky, as usual, said nothing. She simply touched his face
Like his mother used to
Long ago, when he was a very small boy.
And he knew.
I wrote this poem a year ago and published it here under a different
name. I hope you find it as relevant now as it was in those dark
September days.