Slice of Life/SmallPoems Day 26 (lost towns)

(I am participating in the March Slice of Life challenge via the Two Writing Teachers site.  Slice of Life is the idea of noticing the small moments. I have been a participant for many years and each year, I wonder if I will have the energy to write every day. This year, I am going to try to coincide it with my daily poetry writing, and intend to compose small poems on small moments. We’ll see how it goes …)

Day Twenty Six

This quiet is where
they used bulldozers
and floods to bury four
small towns – barn roofs
and fire-stacks, pieces of
people’s homes, still just
below the surface, drowned
but defiant against time –
all for the greater good
of somewhere else

Sometimes it feels
as if we are forever
living in metaphor

Note: We broke up our ‘stay-at-home’ isolation yesterday by driving about 45 minutes to the Quabbin Reservoir, a beautiful scenic space with lots of trails and lookouts over the huge reservoir created long ago to provide water to Boston by destroying and flooding four small Western Massachusetts towns. Some of the buildings are still down there. Communities around here still remember how Boston exerted its political might and removed people from their homes. Yesterday was a bit chilly but lovely in that early Spring/late Winter kind of way, with open grey skies and bracing air, and not too many people about. Everyone greeted everyone with smiles, a nod of the head and wondering eyes, a quiet: Are you doing OK?

Peace (and surface tension),
Kevin

6 Comments
  1. Thank you for including the link to the reservoir. It has some history, doesn’t it?

    Sounds like you need to go and get out of your house just to breathe some fresh air. Plus, it inspired beautiful poetry.

    It can be maddening to stay indoors.

  2. I’m not sure what part of this post and poem I like best. I even love the signature. Peace, yes, and plenty of surface tension. The image of the buildings refusing to be covered up is powerful, and the capturing of people quiet smiles during this time is spot on. We are all focused on each other being okay more than ever.

    • It’s funny because I had the second stanza wandering around in my head all morning, before the hike, and I felt like the view and the stanza were of one piece — but even now, it feels like a leap for a reader to jump from the story of the flooded towns to the idea of living in a time of metaphor …
      Kevin

  3. The towns almost seemed alive, still, in your poem, as if I could peek beneath the surface and see mer-people going about their daily business. Would they be affected by COVID-19? A dystopian fantasy story in the making perhaps….

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