Looking at a Rock Made of Paper
by Yasmine Kadhim

There is a certain spot one must stand, in order to see a picture.
Its place is strangely hidden between vast distances reaching
into depths that appear not only as velvet covered in diamonds,
but as spaces conquerable with an impenetrable mind and the
honorary cloth that leads incessant lines of people unknowing
to heights never before reached but questionably have;
and as near as the immeasurable closeness that comes with
the imperceptible breath that fogs a window.
It was in these spaces that I found a pair of glasses, rimmed in roses.
A crumpling of the sky until its color bore
the sickly color that we’re all too familiar with
in the dead, that we so preciously heap into a pile,
had been altered to the tint of a baby blue sky that
captured the mood of an infant’s naive conception
that every day will be as blue as the day before, but
more lively in which the flowers always budded
and trees swayed like waving hands
The people congregate, breathing in the smells
of the Jasmine flowers that only wake at night
and think just like the flowers, were they ever to think at all?,
that there is only this time, night, and this moment, now, for
a flower to bloom, a fruit to be ripe, and a sky worth breathing
to be treated with such a trusting gasp,
but unknown and very much known are trickling flames
licking the edges, while whirling waters rise up from
the oddly dry, dirty land that somehow everyone
thought they watered, or even thought that there was water to begin with;
the waves were tugging back, luring with wanton excitement as
ash rained from the muddied skies that everyone confused
with those clear enough to sail or perhaps take an early
morning drive along a coastline with ragged edges
edging in and folding the rocks like paper.
It was in those skies that we had seen lights brighter,
more dreamy than our imagination, and yet somehow
we took ourselves from a simple paper rock to another,
untouched and yet watching with glasses quite like mine but,
could only see but soft, dainty, smears and splashes
of expectations coupled with the mighty effect of distance
that constructed out of paper, a formidable but heart wrenchingly
beautiful formation of life without the effects that its shadow casts.
A middle ground must be taken, for an image to be viewed and
understood for its complexities and nuances, along with its themes and moods.
To stand too far would be a crime, punishable by a fine and maybe
a couple days in jail to ponder the reason why whereas
Standing too close is punishable by death, because it is in that small
fraction, if not sliver of a distance, that one can see the roaring and hungry flames,
the sly, tempting yet churning waters, the earth, sunken, dry, barren and hollow
and then a rose.