Dear Future

For the #SealeyChallenge today, Day 27, I read Dear Future, by Nina Corwin (Glass Lyre Press, 2017). What a great cover, right? It's by Bliksem Steen. I know Nina from my Chicago days, and we've worked together on readings at Woman Made Gallery. I've enjoyed her company and her poems for many years. What a fun and strikingly pertinent book this is, full of delightful titles, matching their provocative content, which pursues the promised theme of the future. Nina is also a psychotherapist, so you can bet these poems are wise, philosophical, and insightful.

Examples of the delightful titles: "Poem in Which I Go to the Movies* and See My Future in the Previews," "Poem With a Line From an Ad for Capital One," "What to Pack for the Apocalypse."

*And today two local movie theatres, maybe more, are talking about re-opening! Alas, as our Covid-19 rate is rising, and I expect mitigation measures soon....

I loved looking through "Darwin's Telescope" at lines like these:

     Pretty soon, belief becomes suspension bridge.

     Not long after, I take Underdog,with his little white U and blue cartoon cape, to be my psychic savior.

     ...

     I, too, have my hungers. The hunter-gatherer in me. The need to name on the table of my tongue. The need the need the need

From "What to Pack..." this scary couplet:

     When heads of state play chicken
     on a cliff, the speed of the hotrod is everybody's business.

From "In Due Time," a set of letters addressed, "Dear Future":

     Our steps are bedeviled
     with questions: What
     will we be

     when we grow up? Will we walk
     through a door or fall
     off the edge?

And this terribly pertinent couple of lines, standing out in my Covid reading: "...Spare no expense // on the latest vaccine."

I love those swinging light bulbs, Nina's big ideas, but the sepia gloom of our possible future scares me, moths coming for the light.