Reflective Walls
by Odin Roark

It was but a window then.

The skies of Jersey met Manhattan,
painting neither peace or rage,
held by clouds of gauze laced boundary lines
giving temporary haven to the rising ethos.

Horns,
Voices,
clangs,
jack hammers,
incensed ether of mass confusion.

All of like worthiness
seeking like me a window,
a reflective wall that would give release
to unbridled fear,
copious love,
rampant loneliness,
and a man-child’s hope inside insistent ego.

Like all windows, however…

One either glances through,
contemplates the layered images,
renouncing the obvious,
allowing transparency to direct,

or

Acquiescence pulls shut a curtain of doubt,
whether ignorance,
hostility,
vengeful composure,
or guilt by default.

It was but a window then,

That long ago year
where the attic of discovery
atop a theater
brought forth a youth’s
malign-encrusted portal.

And like a tenuous interface,
the glass separating feathered freedom from fearful man,
old visions slowly shattered in its slow-motion choice,
its seemingly invisible truth ‘til this moment
giving birth to epiphany.

For windows provide not answers from gifts outside,
but instead provide a reflection that asks we look within,
find the echo from light afforded by shadow’s lateral arabesque,
and embrace the inner treasures so often left undiscovered.

So few of us give ourselves permission
to embrace the hidden gifts,
even as we smile at the drifting amorphous gray outside
that offers few answers
but the joy of new questions defining
why windowed walls provide such giving illusions.

Our reality perhaps is what we make of these reflections,
these ponderable truths one can not escape,
for windows mirror what’s there.

Is it more than a passing semblance
of how we appear to others?

Who do you see?