The world is a magnificent museum,
and Time is its curator.
Every person,
every creature,
is a temporary, living exhibit,
born of wax and earth,
animated by lungs and
(sometimes)
a heart.
The sky is grey today,
cumulonimbus clouds crouching close to Earth
and flooding the air with wind and rain,
closing for a moment the gap that
separates mortals
from heaven.
I run through the raindrops and
receive the sky’s embrace
with outstretched hands and bared feet.
The others hide behind closed doors
in houses of false security.
They peer at me through glass windows,
regard me as an animalian spectacle.
I’m a minor curiosity to them,
nothing more than
an orangutan at the zoo.
But they’re the ones locked away,
voluntary caged captives,
refusing to view this gift of life
as anything but an onslaught.
They shake their heads at the nonsense of
a joy they cannot understand.
or–rather–
a joy they do not even
wish to understand.
Then the joy is electrified—
lightning strikes the ground,
the luminescent walking staff of the storm
stumbling through the world like an
unsteady giant.
His footsteps rumble through the air
while I dance around his feet.
The storm draws curtains over city landscapes that
in / ter / rupt
the harmony of the wild place this once was.
It blurs the lines of history,
and I remember
dreaming and breathing and being,
free from the self-imposed prison of urbanization.
The tinted windows of the museum that is the world shatter in the storm.
The foundations are exposed by the harshness of the lightning—
it is built upon destruction,
trapping its inhabitants in
a forest of iron and clay.
So I run away,
for a moment,
from the taskmaster of reality,
though I know I must return.
I want to dance at the feet of giants.
Comments