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Thursday, February 17, 2011

In its coming, glory-less, there will be no lord

Blind skies have gleaned
their stories from the strumming of the bored,
but they do change them.
They rearrange them,
their outcomes, slightly,
and, when they retell them,
the words fall back to us lighter,
delightedly so, than they were before.

“It’s just us.”
We’ve heard.
“It’s just us,” more called,
and they shared this secret:
“Those blind skies aren’t blind at all.
They only pretend
not to see, as they bend
the wind to help us.”

They let us think,
“The movement’s thanks to me,”
when we tell our shortened tales
where the Lord doesn’t deliver us.
We tell them to no-one
and anyone in particular,
by pecking our thumbs with an irregular,
scratched-out beat.

It happens too when they slow us down,
and we punch-in our excuses.
“I would have gotten here sooner
in fact, but the tactless crow I followed
took a crooked path.”
That’s when not-blind skies wink
and they lift our rhythmic letter-breaths
to become the stuff of linty pockets.

Some day, one day,
not a spare hour or minute
but the splittest second before
a glory-less death,
our stories will snow back on us.
We’ll hear them
and the words will feel
familiar, though a little more gray.

Then the smallest voice
we’ve ever heard,
somehow both ours and theirs,
will say, “The gist is got
but the endings are not
quite right. Yet,
I admit they’re also righter
than my telling’s long-ago was.”

4 comments:

Joseph L. Hartman said...

“I would have gotten here sooner
in fact, but the tactless crow I followed
took a crooked path.”

Love this line.

manik sharma said...

francis,
this is my favourite amongst all your works i have read ...starting from the title itself...."our stories will snow back on us".....what an image francis....cold and ominous....this is fiery....the whole of this....and in a way makes you feel cold ...i admire people who do not mask expressions just to raise their show value...and you serve them plain and in unique yet simple ways.....

Francis Scudellari said...

@Joseph Thanks... I'm a bit fond of that line too :).

@Manik I'm glad you like it. I've been trying to simplify my language lately. I think the challenge is always to convey complex ideas and emotions with very accessible words.

manik sharma said...

francis,
i second that thought...and i can see some changes too...and i think it is for good...but yes do let us have a glimpse of the inaccessible too...learning is a curve after all(discovering the blind side)...