Ok! Today's dVerse prompt is "underground." It reminded me of a poem I wrote about a dream I had a long time ago. It was one of those vivid ones; reading the poem gives me flashes of images of the dream itself. The human brain is amazing, isn't it?
May 14, 2009: A Dream Humanity fled last night to hives underground to escape possible disease; Americans shoved into shelves with impossibly small cracks to be shoved into by, sealed in by the wires of their possessions, wires shot across to submission by fierce, burnished androids who didn't shoot me, who handed me a highlighter and a card like a Commuter Rail ticket and told me to count their shells, to tally their averages. The Androids, silver like they bathed in eye-shadow, are impressed with my speed. I'm quick “for a human” they said. “I'm Ashkenazi” I said like that explained it, and we—a man, a woman and I-- fled to the surface world un-pursued, to poke around junkyards; everything has been abandoned and it all ended up here and we wander, picking through skis and docks, trucks and mattresses and home telephones until we find the little red car that might have been waiting for us to ride away through towering alleyways white with sunkissed snow.
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By popular request (click here for the backstory), and for dVerse's Open Link Night #196, I present....
Voir Dire Limerick #2! The prosecutor was in a huge hurry, so he paid no attention to selection of jury. From that mistake it transpired he lost and was fired and now he's got reasons to worry. I'm back from vacation! It was amazing. Maybe I'll even post a few pictures. But that's beside the point...because it's Quadrille Monday over at dVerse and the assignment is to write a quadrille (a 44 word poem) using the word "echo" in some way.
This weekend I got the call to come sub for my friend's softball team (adult rec league) because they were short a player. Turned out we were short more than one player and had to forfeit before we'd even started, but the other team wanted to play and had an abundance of players, so they loaned us a few players (and bats) and away we went. How did we do? Oh, so badly. How did I do? Badly. But no worse than anyone else. The forfeit was mooted by how badly we lost. I actually don't know how badly we lost by because I wasn't counting and no one announced anything, but the final score was definitely A Lot to None. Anyway, I was in the outfield most of the game, because during the decade or so I played softball as a kid I was always in the outfield. And the minute I started standing out there, I felt like I'd never left the outfield. That same dream-like state induced by mostly just watching a game one is also participating in kicked in...and it inspired this poem: Softball Quadrille Remarkable how fast the echo of the past seals around my curved view; suddenly the last decade is gone and I've never left the outfield. A descending deja vu, I'm thinking the same thoughts I used to; half escapist clouds and half quiet strategy. |
AuthorRachel Rosenberg; poetlawyer Archives
September 2017
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