Grinding the Lens
I am pulling myself together.
Don’t want to go on a trip.
I have painted the living room white
and taken out most of my things.
The room has never been so empty.
Just now a banging thunder
and suddenly falling rain.
I leave the typewriter and run
outside in my nightgown and take
the cotton blanket off the line.
It is summer and I am in the middle
of my life. Alone and happy.
Notes
The poem tracks the meticulous, quiet labor of polishing away the cloudy imperfections of a surface until it becomes entirely transparent to the world's light. It aligns perfectly with July's philosophy of lightness, demonstrating that true clarity is a process of subtraction; patiently scraping away the heavy, distorted layers of our own egos and preconceptions. By transforming a repetitive, earthly task into a pursuit of pure vision, it reminds us that the mind becomes truly unburdened when it stops projecting its own internal shadows and simply allows reality to stream through unfiltered. #poetry #summer #unburdened #nature #beauty