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Mirroring
Kristin Roedell

I am giving up beauty.
Not the silver thickets and the sandpipers
Not the grass beneath the lake,
not the way my child’s hair eddies
when I rinse it in the bath--
but the lighted rooms when
tall and cool
I am effortlessly suspended in the
wordless hush of sight and gifted desire,
drifting quiet like a trout at the water’s edge,
pulled by a gentle current.

I will learn eyes that look outwards.
Since I no longer pull and sing like the current,
when a river butterfly
touches silent surfaces with delicate feet,
I will bend to meet it myself.
When an egret stands in the
marsh shallows with folded wings,
I will call it lovely.
This is beautiful, this is not,
this is an endless garden of reeds,
this is the forest after a rain.


First published by Damselfly Press

 


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