For a change of pace, here’s a poem dedicated to the inconsequential in your peripheral vision that still manages to take you out of yourself if only for a moment
Urban Moment
Lonely square, you are out of place
In this vast plane of concrete sidewalk
Deliberately cut, as if for the planting of a tiny bush
In-filled with weeds of tiny broadleaf
You curve the strides of human giants
Who hustle past you, thick Bonzai jungle
As you would appear to an insect or an ant
Break this stride from hotel
To skyward tower of corporate strength
Disrupt this pedestrian’s gait
Intrude on this mind
Consumed with the importance of the day
As a mirror might force a pause
For a look, not at what will be seen by others
Or to check a statement of fashion
But a glimpse into a state of mind
To see hurt where others see happy
To see failure when colleagues see competence
To see ugly when lovers see beauty
As things could or couldn’t be, as they should be, as they want to be
If for only a moment
Plush carpet of green
Of perfect form from the avian view
Like the statuesque order that is Manhattan from the sky
Lonely piece of precise geometry
Tiny emblem on the urban surface
A dash of reflection carved from the day
Lovely square
A brush with the lushness of life
Jason Makansi, October 2009
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I like it. What exactly are you talking about though? What inconsequential thing has so captured your attention? Also did the pasting into your blog take away the stanzas, because I generally like stanzas in a longer poem like this one. I love the whole section about the mirror, it’s really wonderful. But how does the mirror connect to what you’re looking at?
I was walking from a hotel to a meeting in Boston’s Cambridge area and this square was cut out of the sidewalk right in the middle. Even though it only had these tiny weeds growing in it, all the pedestrians were walking around it (and it was a crowded sidewalk at that hour). I mean, you see those cut out squares along the curb for planting trees or bushes but not in the middle of the sidewalk! As for the mirror, this “square” made me pause the way you might pause passing a mirror and “check yourself out.”
As for the stanzas, that’s because I don’t know how to type into this box and keep the line breaks.