A Poem of Profound Disorientation -- When the Familiar is Strange ...

Some poems virtually write themselves and the so-called author hardly knows what to say of them. This is such a poem of profound disorientation, when the familiar is made strange and, during one's waking hours, one is transported into a kind of dream state.

All I can say is that it was evening when this poem was composed.

Something needed to be communicated and it got out:

Swithering

Sometimes, after the rain, returning home
the night is like a dark dew-speckled rose
and somewhere in between all that velvet
of those petals, we no longer are sure

How we got here or who’ll greet us at the door
which indeterminate shape or tormenting love
will receive us with an embrace or ashen kiss
amid the mist and great potpourri of spirits

Will it be wife, mother, lover or yet another
shadow figure we’ve buried in a dream, or not yet met
such as the child who played hide and seek too well
long after everyone had moved on, into adulthood.

© Yahia Lababidi, author of Learning to Pray