The Kite and The Hawk
Lorenzo Thomas
Lorenzo Thomas
Man is no longer alone in the universe!
The day I found the hieroglyphic formula
For happiness for all mankind
I had to promise to give it away.
It is we have to find a way
For everyone to have
one more of something
Than your neighbor has
For you--here is a dollar!
And for you,
I feel warm brotherhood
And love intense
Beyond what anyone has ever felt before.
You didn't think I'm going around
And giving everybody money?
For me
The syllable of antique power
To shift the Light above
Enough to cast the second or third shadow
The Grand Prize
In the lottery of loneliness.
---So, the solution to outwitting loneliness is to shift the sun's light and cast it on someone other than yourself. Warm brotherhood. Warm sisterhood. That is how I am choosing to read this poem. On first reading, I fully intended to write about the six-million dollar lottery frenzy going on around the country, but after the second and third reading, my thoughts went in an entirely different bent. (Incidentally, I have a stake in lottery tickets from Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, and Oregon. What will I do if we win? I will travel everywhere, write and make art all the livelong day, lallygag, fiddle dee dee, and la di da. That is what I will do). Back to my entirely non-lottery bent: Making certain my neighbor has a little more or shifting the light reminds me of the advice I received from my gentle, very sweet, non-judgemental, totally Mormon, non-confrontational sister: pray for my enemies. I know when she told me this I rolled my eyes and probably covered my phone and said pfft! You know what? It worked. At first you better believe I prayed for my enemy: to have a biblical plague descend upon her, to exit the bathroom with a trail of toilet paper tucked in the waist of her pants and for no one to tell her, for Monty Python's paper cutout finger of god to come out of the heavens and wag at her, for Karma to circle round and be a mighty bitch and just get her and get her again, to... and to... and to... You get the idea. After I cooled down and grew up and stopped praying for an apocalypse to befall her, I tried wishing for very specific good things to happen for her. I saw her happy. I saw her apologize and mean it. And then suddenly I couldn't remember the specifics of the problem, exactly. The story had gone cold. And then suddenly, I didn't think about her. Ever. The next time I saw her, four years later, I greeted her like we were still friends, because I had forgotten she was my enemy. I remember she was shocked. She said she didn't know why she did what she did. It was nice to receive an apology, but I had already seen it in my wish. And that was real enough for me to move on. So, it just may be that the solution is to shift the light. | ||
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