Cenotaph (poem)

Cenotaph

The undertone and halftone of every shadow

lead the eye astray

Your bread has taken on a grey hue

Your milk and eggs

Your shirt and shoes

Like clouds against the greyer backdrop of the

grey sky

Offset softly not too harshly

Whatever the ground contains lives here indifferent

Overdressed but inert as stone

Less alive than roots of trees

But here peace is imposed

You never breathe because the air is filled

A story in spontaneity

A trip, a purchase, a hug, a conversation, a reaction,

a misunderstanding

Unkempt, propelled by a coat sleeve

Wandering through bright crowds disappearing

And stopping here where nature is permitted

Certainty

That you a seaborne larva in the deep might trawl

And beam light to the sky

Where the God-eye assumes

Nothing here is deified

Defile perhaps the chakras

A grubbing finger flays the spine

The nervous twitch of modern life is only electricity

Pulsed through the cage like the green spectrum

of the canopy

Cenotaph

(2015, Stephanie Foster)