Urban Cottage, a poem by Odyssey/Dorchester scholar-in-residence Nia Gabrile
Jun 25th, 2013 by edudley
Urban Cottage
Perhaps they’re all dead
No spider I see
Just another web lingering in a stairwell corner
In the house of wood and light
I manage to fight off a creeping heebie jeebie
And forget about the creepy crawler
Crawling up through the floors to hitch a ride on my back
My hair twitches
But I know it’s just the dust
It blankets everything here
Books
Stairs
Chairs
Window ledges
My shoulders
Backside
My hands
The edges of my thoughts
It becomes the carpet where no carpet, draperies or sofa exists
My friend and I whisper
Dust bounces off
Instruments of wood, paper, glass
Carrying our voices from the
First floor to the third
Our voices a symphony for the spiders
Lurking in corners I have yet to discover
I suppose we are their entertainment
Just as mesmerized by the music we make
As I am by the perfume of a little wooden cottage
In the middle of Woodlawn
Spiders clap silently
As we humans tend to our work
Constructing a form of beauty
Out of chaos and loss
–At least we are attempting to do so–
Debris of our construction lies
Outside the window on a low rooftop deck
I imagine, one day, the deck clean, made into a brilliant white by the sun
Me and my Playbook sitting on a silver chair
Watching a Metra ride by
But I’m really sitting on the edge of a plank of wood
A platform step
While dust falls like snow into the crevices of my being
And a Chicago wind hurls itself against the windows
But it doesn’t have the strength to come inside
Only sunlight floods this room
Illuminating doors inside me I didn’t know existed
Enveloping me like a cocoon
While I attempt to weave a dragonfly
Out of bits of wing, leg, eye, antennae
And I know that, today,
I am in a most beautiful place
Nia Gabrielle is a writer, photographer, and a graduate of the Odyssey Project, located in Chicago, Illinois. Nia is always looking for a way to create something whole and beautiful out things broken and made ugly. She is currently a Scholar-in-Residence with Dorchester Projects.
Copyright © February 2013 by Nia Gabrielle
Thank you for posting it!