Click-click. Click-click.
Along the pavement speeding, the mark of a sole
against the concrete, her right to live how she wished.
A penny she threw into a fountain.
“Oh, let me, please,” she pleading said.
“Let me be a poet in my life.”
Chill air, blanketing on all sides. Midwinter.
No water flowed: the fountain empty.
The penny chinked against the water, hard stone.
Still, a vessel of hope, slightly hollow,
rock-carved, wish-laden, leaving space
for passersby to inaugurate their wishes
and see them to fruition, by force of human hope.
But it was not only the hope of poetry, why
she tossed the coin, landing heads-up on the stone.
A force, working, too, in her, the power
of that “ever greener” we’re so conscious of,
sometimes, when we would rather be
any place but where we are.
Click-click. Click-click.
A mark of verity: True. Hard. Concrete.
She ambled out the alley, to the street.
Waiting – now – to see if all she had just wished
(the penny held) would come to be.
And if it did? Would she be renowned?
Known far and wide, a person looked up to?
Who seized life when it came?
And if not? Would she live, knowing she had not
done in life all she once dreamed to do?
Could she live, not the poet she sought to be?
She clicked out the alley, rallying her senses
to carry her back to the center of town.
A little hope met her, knowledge, too:
that she could make of herself all she wanted,
find peace in life, from that fountain outward.
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