Poem
By Ethan Naegele
Traveling down the road rife with seemingly indefatigable chaos,
I look in the rear view mirror to warm scenes and warm dreams—
memories that have me swimming in my head so pleasantly.
On the first morning of kindergarten I looked up to a strange sky—
one that caught the orange glow in a way so novel and breathtaking,
The same sky in the same light seen a thousand times since.
Coming home from first grade, the first time with petrichor in my nose,
muddy earthworms in my hands, I explored in my own backyard—
the same backyard that now turns plain and dull in my eyes.
Now through the windshield I see again all that is beyond me,
in more ways than one.
There are meteors crashing into the distant forest—
dozens of deer flailing across the road wildly—
all that is the chaotic potential of the universe lies ahead,
and maybe it will ruin me,
but I see the sky ahead catching the light in a new way today, so perhaps it won’t.
But surely this is the beginning of madness, I say to myself,
as I ride down the fading pavement into dirt, through air increasingly nebulous,
but as I carve through it, the air becomes more tame and relaxed.
I become more tame and relaxed.
Yesterday I thought those youthful days of exploration were lost forever,
but now I find that they’ve only fled down the road of life;
they are there between the forest trees in the gaps of darkness—
there in the mind, perhaps fatal, perhaps not—
there behind the fog and down the road—clandestine, unseen.
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