Something, I'm not sure what ... perhaps the fact that I've worn glasses for a long time ... set me to thinking about how we see things on the "eye chart of life."
Things past ... those large symbols near the top ... are the easiest to read. We can make them out with no difficulty. Also, we see them so well because we enhance them. In our thoughts they become better ... or sometimes worse ... than they really were.
But it's those things in the future ... those tiny images at the bottom of the chart ... which are so hard to make out. Oh, we'd like to be able to read them all, but we simply can't know with certainty what the future is going to bring for us.
Each day is a new page, sometimes the beginning of a new chapter in the story that is yet to become.
Patience, I tell myself. Patience. In time, some of that will become clear ... and the rest can wait.
The poem:
JUST AS WELL
On the eye chart
of my mind
I can see clearly
those distant symbols.
No blurring, in fact,
a sharpening focus
as I sit looking back
to times long past.
It's those last few,
nearer, lines of things
lying just ahead
that give me trouble.
It's just as well,
I tell myself; they will
reveal themselves
when it's time for that.
©
2006(originally published in Capper's)
***
Today's word:
symbols
2 comments:
What a great analogy to the eye chart. Oh, if only we had such glasses...
I like your photo of the clouds. Wispy, whimsical :)
I'll begin with your whispy photo...great!
Your poem is, also. Yesterday, I just went to the opthomologist for what I thought was something in my eye...and she mixed up my chart with someone else's, and was surprised at how well my eyesight had improved...and especially since I wasn't taking the medicine she had prescribed to the one who belonged to the chart. She finally caught on that something was amiss, and asked me if I was Mary Somebody. I told her who I was and of course, she blamed me and said I must have come into the wrong room...but not so...I was so glad she wasn't my surgeon. Anyway...I wish it were just a case of taking medicine as far as seeing ahead. I wouldn't want to know everything, but enough to help keep us from falling into pits.
I do wish more people would make comments. I think your readers like to read them...at least I do.
Bob, I like the things you write before the poem. I know that one reader reads that part after reading the poem. Maybe I'll try that some time, but I like the "lead-in" so much. Otherwise, it would just be a poem a day...excellent poems, but, the part before it is exteremely well written, and always gives me a smile and/or chuckle.
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