The Mirror: A Poem

This poem was inspired by my first semester in Hawaii. That first night, when I slept in the bedroom I had not slept in since I was four years old, was very strange and solemn to me, and I couldn't help but feel like I had disturbed a kind of sanctuary, a place where only ghosts of my past self had dwelt all these years and now had to give way to my real, living, but much older self. A mirror that has hung on the back of my bedroom door all these years made the greatest impression on me, as I have a special fondness for mirrors. I was almost afraid to look into it for the first time. I wondered if it was saddened to now reflect an adult woman's face, when it had over a decade of lonely years to obsess over my child-self's reflection. Yeah, I know, weird, but I felt sorry for it. And so I wrote a little poem. Not in my usual style, and certainly in need of polish, but it captures rather well the feeling I had at the time.

The Mirror.

There is a pale old mirror hung
Upon Grandmother's door,

It catches all the window-light
And hurls it to the floor.

The carpet pale is grey with dust,
The air is thick with haze:

Each mote reflected in the glass
Is minutes, hours, days . . .

This room belonged to Granddaughter
When she was barely four,

So long ago that the old room
Does not remember her.

But ah! That pale old mirror
In that lonely room apart

Still holds the image of the child
Within its glassy heart.

The shy little girl-image
Waits in her looking-glass world,

And dreams of brighter, sweeter times,
When she and Grandma's girl

Would draw out dreams with crayons
To hang proudly on the wall,

Or stand up in their mirrored cribs
And pretend they were tall.

The image in the mirror smoothes
Its polka-dotted dress

And passes years with memories
Of times ere loneliness.

Passes years with hoping,
Though the hoping is like pain,

That the child will come back to smile
Into the glass again.

*

And then, one darkened evening
When magenta stained the sky

And clouds all hemmed with vivid flame
Burned through the shuttered blinds;

When the glass was filled with shadows
And hardly dared now to hope more,

A young voice sounded in the hall,
And pushed open the door.

A figure stumbles in the darkness,
Groping for the light--

The mirror-child is trembling:
Something is not right--

A slender hand now finds the lamp,
A finger flicks it on--

Harsh and vivid shines the light
And the face it spills upon.

*

The mirror's frame is red with rust,
And dimmed now is its glass,

And standing now before it is
The child returned at last . . .

But years have come and lived and died;
A flowing tide of water.

The glass endured, impervious--
Not so the young Granddaughter.

A moment more she lingers there,
Entranced, but not sure why,

She stands and her reflection stands,
And they stand eye to eye.

The one looks in and the one looks out:
A woman, strange and clever.

O Mirror! Did you weep when the child
Within you vanished forever?