Time is humbling—
years later, we discover
we are exactly the same people.

Did you think you were becoming better?
More solid, perhaps, just
more like yourself.

The leaves don’t change
when they turn yellow, then red. 
Though it’s true:

when the children are finally old enough to disappear 
for hours at a time,

and the grownups drift across the street and settle in
to the pop and click of bottle tops,

when what you imagined to be change
reveals itself as exactly the same idea 
you’ve been having since you were ten
and it’s too late now to hide its true condition
in front of all these people—

it does feel like we’ve arrived at time’s other hemisphere,
the real one, where beauty, who was always with us,

is finally apparent: 
drifted down, shivering
and happy on her stump.

Nina Lindsay

Librarian, poet, and author of Today’s Special Dish (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2007), whose second collection with Sixteen Rivers is forthcoming in spring 2016. Nina’s work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Fence, New World Writing, Mudlark, and other journals. She lives in Oakland, California.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Four Years Left on Earth, 1128-word “flash poem” in Mudlark (Poster No. 69, July 2012)

⚡ Five “Mistranslation” Poems in New World Writing (17 October 2011)

⚡ Five Poems in Mudlark (Poster No. 77, 2008); includes three lineated poems, a prose poem, and nine haiku