P O E T R Y
On a Sunny Hill in the 22nd Century Being Attended by Steel Hands
The world viewed through melted glass
Published in
2 min readJul 25, 2023
Machines feed me honey
artificial bees make it, I think,
there aren’t any real ones left,
these days too many things shine
They won’t tell me my name
The machines dress us all in white
and we are arrayed like ceramic
statuary, sunning in recliners out
on a hill among their gleaming skins
They watch us like shepherds — or maybe wardens
An airliner sends out echoes
flies into a dazzling sun
fuselage a fluted crystal
I see blue sky right through it!
They tell us not to look at the sun,
but what difference does it make?
My skin is translucent
veins blue as rivers, and I
trace their courses around brown
splotchy shoals and raw red reefs
Headwaters, branching tributaries
I think of myself as a vast watershed,
rivers slowly…
