Let It Rain, London Workers, & Eyes

• Facebook
• Instagram

Edward Lees

__________

Let It Rain

I was the only person in my confirmation class
not to go through with it.
I had to talk to the pastor,
tell him how I wasn’t sure I believed
the words I was supposed to say.
I think it was mostly because it was so hard
to conceive of that greatness,
of what might come next.
It’s like when one asks
what’s beyond outer space.
The mind struggles to find purchase.
Swimming deep under water,
I see air bubbles form and slowly rise
in small clusters, rounded from ascent,
following their brief unpredictable course.
In filtered light, they start to shimmer
with something like anticipation
for what comes at the surface,
where they disperse in a vanishing ring,
sky-melding.
I wonder how long before
some of them will be a bubble again.
This is a mirror of rain falling into the same sea.
Both disappear into their greater selves,
drawn towards a grand returning.

__________

London Workers

I walk between buildings and look up at them like trees. Each is a different manifestation of the
same intent. This city keeps growing workers too. We unfold in the damp when the rain comes
like dark mushrooms, revealing a hidden truth: there is an interchangeableness despite the
individual underneath. Our goals seem different, but they are similar words said in dissimilar
languages. We follow each other in lines along the city’s roots, like ants, but without
communication, unless it is the unspoken sense of what is expected. When I walk it is always the same way, unless I decide to go one block further on a chosen street, delaying the turn in order to see if anything has changed – perhaps how much a construction project has progressed. I am marking time but am also searching for the small piece of satisfaction that comes from seeing windows being put in or another floor of girders installed. To bear the repetition, I want to witness that there is a larger goal with my own eyes, that despite each day ending like the last, we still somehow advance, bit by bit, towards the sky.

__________

Eyes

Coming back from work I
see in evening rain,
a seated supplicant
whose sunken cheeks speak
of choices made.
Her eyes, yesterday, glazed,
today buck
from some new realisation,
as if an earlier self lingers
after having just woken up
from a dream of family
and can’t reconcile the divide.
Above her, unnoticed,
are lashes of light –
grand bounded boulevards,
whose lines unhide physics.
They come from a rent in the sky
behind which lies open greatness.
One can only just sense the scope:
the planets, the ages,
the vast unknown places
to which we all belong
and that make us whole.

__________

Edward Lees is an American who lives in London. During the day he works to help the environment and in the evenings he writes poetry. His works have been accepted for publication in various journals including Southern Humanities Review, The Common Dispatches, Potomac Review, San Antonio Review, and Anthropocene Poetry Journal.

__________

🢠 Back Next 🢡

To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.