“The Glasshouse Garden, or Art and Resistance”

Glass bubbles float, baubles on the pond,
fire on water with the lilies and the lotus,
good for nothing, useless. All I want to do
is drift alongside that unjustifiable beauty.
The glassblower lunges and stabs, throws
the glowing water until it freezes. To make
a poem doesn’t seem like use, but phrases,
even broken into fragments, can be held
for years in some pocket of memory, felt
dim and retrieved as I do a flimsy shimmer,
a glass-blooming flower stalk in cold weather.
improbable, something to spy out as the sky
darkens, some glimmer of sound, a beloved
word that says, Not yet, that says, Never.


--Minnie Bruce Pratt

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Creative Commons 2010