|
| bottles |
| Farewell to the bottles! |
| I have celebrated their contents, |
| then filled them with messages |
| releasing them slowly |
| on wild current promises, |
| imagined their travels, |
| feared for those shattered, |
| dreaded those found, |
| more. |
| At their conception, |
| I've followed orderly shelf-rows |
| guessing their contents, |
| sneering I could see through them. |
| They weren't deep, |
| their only claim to profoundness |
| their origin: Like earth, beginning in fire, |
| an expanding sphere, reflecting its maker, |
| horribly glorious in its flow, |
| endlessly patient in being formed. |
| A bottle flows to my feet: |
| Filled with enough hope |
| or imagination it is, precariously, |
| up to its neck in water. |
| Once I was filled with spirit, |
| but drunk with my own power, |
| I consumed myself. |
| My emptiness now |
| has made me more transparent, I think. |
| © Jon Bohrn (2000) |
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