Photo: ‘Morning Moth’ by Ian Lindsay – Pixabay
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OPENING…
And I thought… had I never looked within, never plumbed my own depth, how could I even be acquainted with how or what I was grounded in… would water-bugs skimming the surface of placid pools ever know anything put the flat-line? Ken’s poem reminds me, my own time-line can be plumbed… opened… experienced fully… in-depth. There is more to pain and sorrow and joy than my ideas about them… the expanse and profoundness from which they emerge…
MORNING MOTH
by Ken McKeon
I’ve been wrestling with a breath for hours now,
That’s not unusual,
My days typically start that way,
It’s my morning norm,
My lungs feel ragged,
There’s a rusty sort of struggling about them,
I reach down into them
And find what seems to be
A halting aching,
As if night’s long similitude of death
Has formed a kind of crust,
And has settled into itself,
It’s aiming for deeper sleep,
Some darkly easy absence realm
Where molecules give way to particles,
And those to barely spinning
Modalities of time,
There’s finally nothing much at all,
Maybe a few soft brushes
Of passing gleaming fish,
Or odd strains of shadow songs,
That’s about it,
Golden daylight has no access here,
None at all,
But there is a maybe sense of some horizon
Fluttering with light,
A strange moth, dusty heavy wings, blank moth eyes,
It’s starting to lift,
I feel it in my shifting shoulders,
And I find myself back here
Trying to wake up.
