The Thing About Life

The Thing About Life

Elizabeth Raby

 

It's a strange thing about life--

how we want it, no matter what--

the cane, the hearing aid,

the oxygen pulled along behind us

like a grocery cart, which, of course,

it sort of is, feeding us our necessaries.

For the fortunate, the brain continues to function

at more or less its accustomed pace--

a little clog, a blockage here and there,

but we manage to work around them,

process and produce.  Through

my thicker lenses, around my

growing cataracts, I still am able to see

the hummingbird, iridescent green speck

riding purple-leaved branch of the plum tree

in early morning breeze. Behind them
 once again the sun clears the mountain.

Elizabeth Raby has been a poet in the schools for the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, the New Jersey Council of the Arts, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. She taught poetry writing at Muhlenberg College.  Raby represented the Teachers for Tomorrow program as an English Teacher in Deva, Romania.  Her publications include The Hard Scent of Peonies, Jasper Press, Camphorwood, Nightshade Press, and Ten Degrees Above Zero, Jasper Press. She has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico since 2001 where she and her husband run a monthly open poetry reading.  Raby is a member of the board of New Mexico Literary Arts and a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
More on Raby's books and poetry from Visual Artists Collective