Life - A Snapshot

BY LYNNE BURNETT.

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There’s the darkness before
and the darkness after,
like the moment before
and the moment after.

There’s the face you see first
and the last face seen,
the body you’re given
and the one you give back.

There’s the bridge
where everything happens,
where you’re still arriving
without having left.

There’s the sky above, clouding
heaven, and you, looking up,
willing vessel for the filling or
navigator supreme of a sea-swept heart.

There’s the blank white canvas:
a day, a page, a mind
where forgetting what you know
is the best kind of remembering.

There’s the landscape, ever-changing,
like the architecture of love,
and waving from the long hall
of mirrors, anonymous, your soul.
​
There’s the pause in the story,
the seventh day that makes a world:
the fathomless deeps light
will pass through to shine,
shine undiminished in you.

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Lynne Burnett lives in the Pacific Northwest. Publications include Arc Poetry, Blue Heron Review, Calyx Journal, Comstock Review, Crosswinds, CV2, Kissing Dynamite, IthacaLit, Malahat Review, Mockingheart Review, New Millennium Writings, Ristau, River Styx, Tamsen, Taos Journal of Poetry & Art, The American Journal of Poetry, The Pedestal Magazine, Underfoot Poetry, and several anthologies. A Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, she is the 2016 winner of the Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize and joint winner of the 2019 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Irresistible in 2018. Visit her at  www.lynneburnett.ca.