Flashlights

Chapter 9: DESIGN

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

A compact collection of lyric sketches, reflective poems, and stories in verse that illuminate fleeting moments of urban and domestic life. Through vignette-style pieces the author observes barbershops, cafés, and crowded public spaces, probing loneliness, social exchange, and quiet moral dilemmas. Other poems turn inward to meditate on longing, rest, and mortality, sometimes adopting epistolary or conversational forms. A concluding section offers narrative metres that compress human interactions into sharp dramatic scenes. Spare language, sensory detail, and shifts between irony and tenderness bind the sections into a mosaic of early twentieth-century moods and manners.

II

DESIGN

If all the world’s a stage, why do we know

Naught of the drama we the actors play?

Are we but puppets, we who come and go

Mumbling our parts through life’s quick-passing day?

What if some master hand design the show

Planning a spacious pattern cunningly!

Time, color, drifting human shapes all go

Into a great discordant harmony:

Let this one’s part be cast in delicate grey,

Let this a heavy purple shadow be,

Here let there come one clear, cold, bluish ray

And here—but hold! one actor suddenly

In desperate rebellion cries his part—

A scarlet tumult from his own hot heart.