It is simply an old cut-glass lamp that has been a light in my life for as long as I can remember (and may be why the first word I spoke—according to my mother, the original owner of the lamp—was "light").
It gives light when its plug is pushed into a silly face on the wall. The new plug and cord were installed after the old rayon fabric-covered cord split and frayed, exposing arteries and veins where currents traveled for decades.
It receives light when the sacred sun of light spies it in mid-winter meditation on the kitchen counter.
It uses light to display colors and has never needed a plug to create such bright magic.
An immobile object, it can change the speed of light. It is straight and solid but a light beam may use it as a conduit for bending its path.
Manmade, it makes what man cannot. For such a little thing, only ten inches tall, it is the height of composure, clarity, and cleverness. This is one dignified show-off.
Silently, it resonates with the songs of the rainbow, if only for flashes in time—eons of neon.
When the moments of my life fade to dark, smash this prism and scatter its shards with my ashes to ashes, dust to light.
Submitted for Poetics at dVerse Poets. This week we are prompted by Mark Kerstetter to consider the form of poetic expression best expressed in the works of the great French writer Francis Ponge (see examples at the link):
. . . focus on an object in your environment, preferably an object from the natural world, to really examine it, to try and see it with utmost clarity, and to wait for the word, that first word or phrase that seems to capture, for you, the essence, in language, of that object. Then use that word or phrase to construct a poem that gives a voice to that thing.
[Photos in this post taken in my kitchen and office today while I was pondering what object I might try to describe.........]
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