Oh, when we were young,
we shone like diamonds
refracting the Sun.
We shone like mirrors,
blinding everyone
with our polished silver.
We burned those around us,
stabbing with bright lances
from convex glass eye-thrusts.
Memory is the first to go
and its light fades to dusk.
Gone, the backlight for the known.
Now old, wrinkled, wizened,
our light is not our own,
but a reflected image
of the young Phoenix-children,
who, in their great wisdom,
can’t see, to them, what we’d given.
©️ Obol, 2019.
