February 2022
Bio Note: My poetry collections A Matter of Timing, Time is Not a River, and Morning Calm are all available on Amazon. This month’s quote: “I’m just a blade of grass on the road” - Ven. Pomnyun Sunim (Korean Buddhist monk and Zen master).
To Paint the World
I hear you in the next room talking on your phone; the low murmur of your voice lulls me into a half-sleep like an old box of letters: cancelled stamps and footprints in the dust. When you laugh, I am jolted awake. Now the conversation seems to be one-sided. I hear you mmmm, and then say goodbye in Korean, a language you patiently taught me to recognize, all twenty-four characters and their multiple combinations, piled so high I slept under them like a child waiting outside the teacher’s home high up in the mountains where birds carried tubes of words in their claws, squeezing color to paint the world, to speak in song.
Originally published in Stillwater Review
©2022 Michael Minassian
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