Lightning

Lightning
“For nowadays the world is lit by lightning” – The Glass Menagerie

Lightning is what woke me that cold night in summer,
not the sensation of my bare toes, or the open window.
I am always a child in that image.

Lightning is a memory so faded that I can’t remember
more than the black and white, that it happened sometime,
but never the way I imagine: with rain pouring outside,

with the whole world sleeping but I, caught in wonder,
alone in the experience of being hurt, of wanting to drift off.
All you see here is mine and no one else’s.

Lightning is the scent of lavender, years older, by the door
at a place that is not my home, though I dream nightly on the bed
in a room small enough for one, smaller for two.

The thunder echoes afterwards, clapping for an encore
telling me to get on stage, to reveal myself for your diversion
to forget that life has just been struck.

Yet it is the sharpness that keeps me alive,
when people come simply to leave me behind,
when the girl doesn’t walk with me anymore,

or when my grandmother passed away one afternoon.
I hold them with my bleeding hands in a flash of white,
until the darkness reminds me who I am.

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Okay, so this poem probably needs some fleshing out still, since I wrote it last night and revised it slightly this morning, but I think it's a poem with a lot of promise. Also last night, I saw the play "The Glass Menagerie" with a friend and really enjoyed it. The quoted line is one of the last of the play and, considering that the play is a memory play, I made the connection between lightning and memory, and enjoyed the connection so much, whether it's what he meant or not, that I decided to write a poem with it. My mom also showed me a poem recently comparing one thing to many images and I wanted to do something like that too. So anyway, the poem is basically about how whether memory comforts us or haunts us, it is what so many people live from. And it's hard to escape, but somehow, it also makes everything else in the moment more alive. And yet in some ways, it also keeps us as children. I'm not sure if I just made any sense right now to you, but it makes some sort of garbled sense to me. Hope you liked it anyway. :)