Water World

                                                  Brenda Bryant

POETIC BLOOMINGS
http://poeticbloomings.com/


WATER WORLD

We creatures of the air

View the creatures of the sea.

I am gazing in at them

And they're gazing out at me.

Maybe fish are clever;

They get us to devise

Aquarium arrangements

Suited to fishy eyes.

Maybe they're in there saying 

'Look at that skinny one!'

Or 'I find viewing humans

The most enormous fun.'

'I must say the male of the species

Looks odd without much hair!'

Or 'It must be most peculiar,

Breathing all that air!'

We have to pay to see them;

But they see us 'for free';

Which is the most intelligent........?

The creatures of the sea.

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MISTY MEMORY

And that is how I remember them, the people from my past;

I expected crisp, bright images that would last and last and last.

There's Grandpa. I really adored him, but except for a photograph

I truly remember just curly hair, a round face and a belly-laugh.
There's Jo, a great friend of my youth, I expected to have recall,

But I just remember her on a bus..... that's absolutely all.

My children as babies? Surely I'd remember each smile and tear!

But no! They're just a vague chubbiness from a very distant year.

How we rely on photographs! Without them we'd be lost,

They'd be like flowers of summertime killed by a winter frost.

In the days before technology, in the days before the 'click',

And even before the first artists learned the portrait trick,

How the bereaved must have wrestled with this absence of recall!

They'd be looking for a memory and finding nothing at all.

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