Poetry

0

The Lake

Take me back and away
Away away away
Way-way, way back
To a boat in a lake
With my mother and father
Way back to a time when we’d flee this life
This life…the life we’d been told
Should be lived some other way…and away we would go
To the calm lake…upon which we’d work hard
To catch fish
Laughing in the attempt
Hardly working
Mostly laughing…and there’d come from within us
A laughter and some stories
Our stories about each other
As we let go
The work of fishing
As the fish let go the work of being caught, for the boat disturbed the water with
its rocking, as laughs and tears came all the same…

And I believe I saw a single fish
As it swam a short distance away, beholding us and the boat, and the rocking, and
the crying and the Laughter
In the now gently, rocking boat…on the calm lake.

Reef

Mate we’ve run upon a jagged reef as the sea moves past 
Like blood from a clotting wound 
We dwell fixed 
Stuck at a tilt 
Our sail empty and twisted on its spar that once held it full 
And once full could take us to those far places 
Imagined now 
Only 
In fractured minds and hearts gone south 
Deep and soured 
In doldrums of our own making 
A kind of bargained-for dead calm

For there had been unrest upon the deck ere we cruised 
Had the reef fetched our ship 
Or had we beckoned it to appear 
To be 
Did our captain send an ill-thought signal or did the boatswain 
Cross his flags ahead of the wind 
Did you sailor fall asleep on watch or did I dream this reef to take us all 
Could I not go into the sea alone

Tupper Cullum is a Boulder-based actor, writer and musician, who has worked in 
Colorado, Los Angeles and New York City for the past 30 years.

Send poetry submissions of 250 words or fewer to poetry@boulderweekly.com.