Sight

by Eve Castle

Crumbling brick
one wall left standing,
blind woman
body and cheek clinging
seeks Braille with raw hands.

A vision of lukewarm days
rises
in the empty stomach
of her naked starvation
and the wall
wet
with cutting rain
is her truth,
and hollowed eyes
striking upward
acquiesce
in abandonment
in grief.

There is so much to this little poem. I'm not sure how much to give you without spoiling the impact. You can imagine that the wall represents "hope". Lukewarm days comes from the book Steppenwolfe by Herman Hesse. His character Harry couldn't stand lukewarm days (days that were not pain-filled or pleasure-filled) because the wolf in him wanted passion. The story Steppenwolfe was about being part man/ part wolf... so for me in this poem lukewarm days represents "nothing special". Then later in this poem the Catholic in me comes out and if you envision every picture you ever saw of Christ on the cross where he is still alive, he is looking upward and that's what I saw in my head when I wrote the last part of this poem. Acquiesce was such the perfect word here... better then relent or surrender - because it's closer in my mind to acceptance. This poem was published in a chap book, Gabe's Poets, Still Searching, December 2009.