Poem: Where Summer is Captured in a Globe

Where Summer is Captured in a Globe

by Amelia Robinson

July 2013

Description: I recently watched a fantastic TED talk by Sara Kay, who is a great lover and advocate for spoken wordpoetry. While I have written poems, I have never considered them "my thing," but I cannot deny the power behind the punch the first line of this poem gave me just before I fell asleep last night. I knew without being told that I should write it down, and after fumbling for some medium to record it with, it flowed into me unlike anything I'd ever felt. After a bit of editing, I am here to share it.

The product of a hundred million moments lives
captured together in a glass globe of silence and structure.
The reemergence of understanding and communication
glows like an ember from its center
and somewhere nearby, there is a globe spiraling with life
hidden away like a needle in a needle stack,
someplace where Eternity wanders and grumbles.
Peers in, sees strange happenings and curious oddities,
ideas flutter like contrary butterflies in the face of these rare birds.

There is laughter that dances like fireflies on a warm summer evening,
while fireworks burst like grand sparklers over the horizon.
There is smoke in the air from a barbecue, carrying the thick smell of memories,
the pushing, shoving, hugging a member of a unit of people so tightly packed together
they might as well be called one thing: family.

There are neighbors in their yards with their children,
capturing their own million moments
that they can cast into globes to showcase on the shelf of the world.
They can say, “This is my love, right here, in this sphere of love and acceptance
that has an armor like eggshells: so delicate and yet can withstand hurricane wind heartbreak
and the biting sting of bitterness and the hot poker-like stab of betrayal.
Let me show you how I wake in the morning with eyes that shine,
shine because I know in 2.5 seconds, there will be a rush of laughter and love
that will push the boundaries of my heart until it aches, until I think
I can’t possibly hold any more of it.
This is my family.”

Another globe nearby rings like fairy song
and peering inside, one would find the purest light,
light that is untrappable,
light that holds tiny dust mites with tender hands,
and light that cruelly dashes away any hopes of darkness.
It is a kind of light that can only come from the core of a mistress
so pleasant and so malevolent that only she can twist
a maze of flash flood warnings and scorching droughts
into something called summertime.

This summer is one of quiet adventures in loud places,
of journeys found in the spaces left on library shelves,
of dancing across asphalt hot enough to fry eggs on--
which the summer heat promises and delivers.
This is a series of subdued nights full of universes winking a sly hello.
It is the heat of a sunburn that feels like a hot, wet breath on the skin.
There are too many sheets for the bed
but there are the little thieves huddling in a giggling mass nearby.
There is too much bug spray and not enough sunblock.
Ice cream melts and sticks on skin salty from the sea,
and somewhere between your toes is sand from another land,
a land where summer is six months away,
a land where summer is a stranger who neglects to knock on its mother’s door.
Pick the sand from your skin and place it in your globe, or better yet,
tip it into a vial like a message in a bottle
and settle it beside your globe,
showcase it on the world’s shelf and leave it for Eternity to dust every so often.

As the heat dies away like a deep twilight overtaking the sky,
cup the remaining heat between your palms and bring it to your face.
Feel the summer’s heartbeat waning.
Breathe it in and keep it in your heart,
let it pulse and throb and spread all the way to your toes.
Hold it like a comforting greenhouse as the world chills and
becomes a peppermint grandmother who has too much to hold
and not enough time in which to hold it.
In the depths of a winter night,
when the air outside crystalizes on every surface,
open up that glimpse of summer and melt a handprint in the snow.
Show the world, with its shelf of globes, that summer is in its midst.
That it is as eternal as the winter,
Mother Nature’s constant, and favorite, companion.