Roses are Pink and Bluebells

L. Edgar Otto   04 May, 2012

You, earthbound, would be surprised at my flight past time to other stars

I too am amazed you stayed in place and made friends with those around you taking root

More so that you were out of sight and it is not quite that you has vanished, we in parallel worlds in our latter days

The white and pink noise of dreams, and who between us spent life in dreams, tilled the earth, planted roses by another name, saw as dark my empty flask of unknowns

Though we share the same tick of smiles as if laughing to our selves even when we speak serious words to another

Yet even then I can only fly faster than your speed of light
by cutting off the waves behind and opening them before

Vertical the limit of the balance and the mean, average lives
we can only stay the final decay half way into infinity

The tests do not measure even this of course, and to say the trauma of the young come back in old age at last in vogue

Your measures of lead and the deafened children from it in the East European air, sometimes it does not pass down the generations, not electrically and not by answers on personality tests- nor for those outside the blue bell curves
some tangle or elixir that will set or change our nerves

I know not what substance of the aether we cannot see beyond that we sense as solid as the dark but now I find it transparent, my debt to you is great in all seasons yet you would feed a once demanding meadow lark with joy

I suspect we both paid a price for solitude for what it matters in the end who takes flight or stays, it is the same old thing should a philosopher marry the simple earthy girl if she longs for more than she can understand yet finds old haunts and life again, but there is no comfort that your memory to hers and not yours, that her two lips no longer sting

Things move on slowly but we descendants of the lion have made a difference in this world whatever the color change of of burst of light or some dark age of aspirations left or right
we are drawn not so far away from liberty and light and not to proud to walk out of the swamp, hands in dirt, heels of tar


There should be a building on compass named after me as that first student who walked all the way from Wilmington to go to school- I have made that journey many times as long lost in the wilderness for forty years, sleeping under the planetarium by the sundial and rose garden blending in with the crazies let out of confinement or the hippies hard to see the difference with their drugs or me lost in the sixth dimension

I found you by accident in subspace but even in the internet you were hard to find, some position in retirement for the faith of the environment, aged beyond my constant memory of you, young and worried that you should jog, eat better for I saw you truly then for in the mirror of my time you do not age

But we found each other by accident in real life in the first place, you in the photo shop and I turning in film for family photos- we the separate lines, Massachusetts and Virgina each it seemed the center of history and reference for all the world how odd we shared the same immigrants through Liberty and now you are grey and I am blue, either side will do and to both we remain but strangers

Or have you in some sense left me clinging to the dirt an are the one in flight to higher gardens in the stars, the planets formed by twos, the water boils in Venus or there's drought on Mars

What can we say to our children who have lives of their own that must leave the nest, display their colors, build high their nests- for we cannot forever stand  to them as if we're the gods they imagined in their dreams perhaps still fear our presence?

I am sure you would agree even if the flora are strange or held hybrids, heirloom, or artificial we the pollinating bees of different stripes and names finding by default history's frail niche,

That when they find that you were just human you will say
In this world at least what makes us so was that we tried to make a better place for you.

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Footnote:  part of the inspiration for this poem like writing was a link on Science Daily.