Stale
How does it occur?
Is the onset sudden? Does it happen by degrees?
By inches? Spoons? By baby teeth?
I’m sure that, once upon a time,
the girls would blush tomato red
when boys proclaimed their love
was like an ancient sea or (somehow)
too a flame.
And though I think they’d still blush now,
the reasons aren’t the same.
Oh! To have been there
when someone first compared
a lover to a rose’s thorn, the river to her hair,
or likened the sun to a tyrant;
Remarked that the
empty circle
of a streetlight’s glow
owes something
to a child lost in surgery.
I like to imagine that it just happened one day,
subtle as a heartbeat. I wonder:
Did it feel like a miracle?
Did it smile like Prometheus,
that ancient blaze
tucked beneath his tongue?
• • •
Ben Hall writes, teaches, and breathes the dust in South Korea. His poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bangalore Review, The Dead Mule, Levee Magazine, The Manhattanville Review, DIAGRAM, and others.
