Now We Are Six
When I was One,
I had just begun.
When I was Two,
I was nearly new.
When I was Three
I was hardly me.
When I was Four,
I was not much more.
When I was Five,
I was just alive.
But now I am Six,
I’m as clever as clever,
So I think I’ll be Six now
for ever and ever.
-A.A. Milne
Convex traffic mirror. At the zoo. Not a monkey. Self- portrait.
Maybe I got the title after viewing the scary preview of the movie which is coming out June first. No dwarfs to be seen. Definitely not for children.
And then I researched convex mirror and find the Pulitzer Prize winning book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and the lengthy title poem of the same name by John Ashberry.
Wikipedia says “Round convex mirrors called Oeil de Sorcière (French for “sorcerer’s eye”) were a popular luxury item from the 15th century onwards, shown in many depictions of interiors from that time.[1] With 15th century technology, it was easier to make a regular curved mirror (from blown glass) than a perfectly flat one.”
And of course they mention the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck which everyone is familiar with but may not know the painting’s title. See the convex mirror in the details if you click on the Arnolfini Portrait link and scroll to the section Mirror.
Okay, just trying to make a photograph of me a bit interesting to others. Convex mirrors seem interesting to me.
About 5 years ago, my friend Lara E. framed the poem in the newspaper, adding the crayon paper peelings around it. Last night at my final video class I scanned it and uploaded it to the blog while I waited for the screening to start. This years crop yielded lots of crayons. The most whole crayons at the end of the year are violet ones.
*NOTE to poet(s) not knowing HTML code I am restricted by the format of this blog template and or the limits of Text/Edit from word.doc to Mac? and the poem will not publish in the original format. It is a five stanza poem and the breaks occur after -out. -Way. -human. – eternal. Hence the hyphens for space and breath.
By Their Sidewalks You Will Know Them
–
Originally there were eleven Commandments
Moses, perhaps confused by the unfamiliar
snow, ice, and sidewalk,
botched one, and left it out.
–
But Buddha said that though Life is Pain,
falling on ice is gratuitous pain
and those who cause it, by neglect,
should never escape the Wheel of Rebirth;
and Lao-Tzu agreed, for those who will not
clear the path will never find the Way.
–
Zoroaster, in the endless war of light
against ice, demanded diligence;
claimed that those who surrender
the public way to the Enemy
have empty souls,
can scarcely be regarded as human.
–
The Prophet, regarding sidewalks and snow,
is silent; but his sura
Sand Drifting Against the Caravanserai Gate
is thought to apply. The condemnation there
is brutal and eternal.
–
Plato counted safe sidewalks as fundamental
to the ideal Republic, noting that those remiss
in this clear duty lacked all character;
and his pupil – perceptive, immortal Aristotle-
further declared, famously, that
lack of character
is destiny.
Timons Esaias is a writer and poet living in Pittsburgh. His short stories, ranging from literary to genre, have been published in fourteen languages. He has had over a hundred poems in print, including Spanish, Swedish and Chinese translations, in such markets as 5AM, Bathtub Gin, Main Street Rag, Willard & Maple, Elysian Fields Quarterly: The Literary Journal of Baseball and many others. He has also been a finalist for the British Science Fiction Award, and won the Asimov’s Readers Award. His poetry chapbook, The Influence of Pigeons on Architecture, sold out two editions. He is Adjunct Faculty at Seton Hill University, in the Writing Popular Fiction M.F.A. Program. This poem was originally published in hotmetalpoets.com when it existed.