Sunday, May 22, 2016

Leaving--By Greg Gregory--United States

Leaving

The space of an empty room is like the space of a cloud, 
an impression of mass, an impression of weight
that isn’t there.  It draws you into its full emptiness.
Rooms and clouds are both simple and complex, like death.

We pick paint swatches for our mood - breath of white, swan dusk,
fleece, sun wash, sail cloth, seashore, forest, darkening sky.

We leave the patina of our fingers, our touch
on walls, on surfaces, sometimes in them.
We darken newly painted wood with every touch
and leave ourselves in it, or try to. 

The dead leave our rooms to discover what they might find,
might touch, on the reverse side of all our painted colors.

They love the slow, soft pearling of window light
that shifts over surfaces, changing each color.

We move through our spaces, our rooms,
believe that we control spaces, define colors. 
We move through breath of white, swan dusk, fleece,
sun wash, sail cloth, seashore, forest, and darkening sky,

insubstantial as a room of clouds
flying to a funeral in a plane at 30,000 feet.

Greg Gregory is retired, but worked in educational media for over 30 years.  His first love has always been language and the printed word.  He has been published in the US, Canada, and England in publications including California Quarterly, Windsor ReviewPoetry Nottingham, and The Aurorean

3 comments:

  1. Greg,
    I like this. I am impressed you were published in The Aurorean, I one of my haiku was in there, but it's not an easy magazine to get into. Welcome to Whispers!
    Your new friend,
    David Fox

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  2. Wow! I'll never look at an empty room or painting a room the same way again.

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  3. Nice work, Greg. I enjoyed your poem. Thank you for sharing and continued blessings!

    -MJ (www.tgbtgpublictions.com)

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