ENIGMA YOU
Beachcombing for shells,
Daydreaming, I found myself
Exploring the Atlantic floor
Near the Pillars of Hercules
And North African shores.
The scent of blue/green algae
Carried me very gently
To the mysterious Sunken City, where
Blue Whales come to play
And create new songs
That takes millennia to sing.
Walking through these deep sands,
Wondering how time combines
With salt air to make colors
Rich in exotic paradox is
When I found the box.
It had to be black
Cause when I picked it up
It turned into different hues
Depending on my view.
~~~
Feeling more like Pandora,
I fumbled to open it.
Inside, wrapped in music,
Bound by ancient harp strings,
Was a textured book.
It felt thick like the agonies of
Women accumulated over
Vast eons of bound feet.
As my fingers tickled the subtleties
Of the book’s fragrance,
WORDS escaped, burst forth
Like they were afraid of the page.
WORDS
WORDS
WORDS
Every word ever spoken,
Written, painted, sung in every tongue
Flew past me
Hitting me
With their numbers,
Their confusion,
Their fear,
With their deepest secrets.
For the first time
I realized how desperate
These word secrets are
To taste freedom.
Over and over WHY flew
Inside my head.
Around and around swimming
In my eyes, HELP screams
Out its STOP!
~~~
Somehow, back on the beach,
The book clutched in my hands
I awaken somewhat confused.
Looking inside the book
Once again, I see it is empty,
Save for one word
Written in bold script:
ENIGMA!?
Smiling, with a warm tug
On my heart,
I can see that the word is written
More as a color,
INDIGO.
The color of the night sky,
Beautiful in its mystery.
ENIGMA / INDIGO.
I think I can see a
Woman’s shape swimming
Towards the shore.
I wonder,
Do you think she will
Talk to me?
Share a billion, billion words?
Or perhaps maybe she will write
A simple, single song
That will take a millennium to sing
And place it in this book?
But in truth,
I think it might be enough really
Just to be possessed by the way
She would pronounce
ENIGMA,
The way she would wrap
INDIGO
With her smile.
Words have weight and motion and I love how this moves a person to feel the words.
Thank you muchly for your comment, Fia. I appreciate how you see this poem, how it affected you. Exactly, how it made you ‘feel’.
What a great story. I especially loved when you wrote about words flying off the book.
So vivid! Words wanting freedom. What a great way to bring them to life.
Adelphina, I love your comment, thank you. I think words do want their freedom and we poets simply pluck them from wherever they are and arrange them on a page. It was strange, actually, when I captured the word Enigma, Indigo appeared in my mind, like magic.