Meditações - the doomsday clock was ticking

Flowerpot

I lay back on the carpeted bottom step

Of the stairwell that like a well extended

Darkly up to the window near the ceiling,

 

Up where the Chinaman under the wide-brimmed hat

That hid his face pulled the flowerpot that held

No flower across the sill no one could reach.

 

There was a television on somewhere

Above me, and the doomsday clock was ticking,

Someone was saying. Someone was saying something

 

About a blockade and a quarantine,

Who would blink first, lose face, or push the button.

A fat man banged a shoe against a desk.

 

The Chinaman however didn’t care.

Pulling his flowerpot of absent flowers,

He was content to be a clot of darkness 

 

Brightening the moment late sun caught the glass—

The hat tip first, and then the hat, the arms,

The rickshaw of the flowerpot he pulled.

 

And everywhere within the light’s slow fall

Infinities of particles were falling

Into the flowerpot they’d never fill.

Alan R. Shapiro