Flat

Flat

A poem by Luna Jaffe

———

There was a time

when everyone believed

the world was flat

and if you walked to the edge

you would fall off,

descending into nothingness.

A heart that stops beating,

that mysterious life force

that feeds hungry cells

through a vast web of tributaries,

is a flat line on a dark screen.

The voice of one newly shocked

by the loss of a loved one,

muted by a paste of

shattered dreams & tears & all

the words unspoken,

comes out flat and as lifeless

as the corpse they sit in front of.

There is no remedy

no reset button, no jump start,

unless you choose to see

through a different lens.

Come with me now,

for a moment just imagine,

how everything changed

when they discovered the world

had no edges, the horizon a

continuous circle held together

by the pulsing tides of the moon.

This life, this body, this earthly home

It is not us...

we are but a speck

in a vast universe of love.

Impossible to comprehend

in the same way, we cannot

grasp the iridescence of

a hummingbird, the five-day life span

of the massive Atlas moth, or how

a tiny seed contains all it needs to

become a mighty banyan tree.

A flat world becomes round

A voice flattened by grief learns to sing

The heart once beating

turns a flat line into wings

and learns to fly.