Finding Peace

I’ve found peace many a time;

peace on cold lonely mountains,
peace within ancient monasteries,
peace in green-shrouded backwaters,
peace by my window at midnight,
peace always alone and serene.

But I found peace most intense
while sitting on a black stone bench
with white graffiti scrawled over it
by the harbor, above the docks.
It was not the calm of silence,
but of delicate sounds
of cars in the distance,
of wind on sails and water,
and of the stars tiptoeing out;
the calm of no one speaking.
The skyline fell away on either side
as far as my eyes could follow.
Magnificent spires framed the bay,
bright lights sparkling in the distance as
the sky bled orange blurry clouds to
drip into the bowl of the ocean’s horizon.
The peace sifted through the humid air
to settle as golden dust on my shoulders.
I breathed out, and snuggled into the arms
and the smile of the one next to me.

Mirror Inversions

She came back from the shops and the sunshine, and stared into her silvered mirror at the expression on her face. What she saw must have startled her, for the glass slipped from her hands and broke, and she fell through the cracks herself. Things look the same on the other side, only inverted, she reassured herself. But what she found was a twisted likeness of her world, a Picasso painting. This was a strange and fascinating realm where the things that she used to mock as feverish hallucinations had fled to seek refuge, and thrived in their new homeland. Fairies sprinkled pixie dust on young men yearning to fly. Dwarfs lurked in the shadows beneath garden toadstools. Men in capes leaped off dizzy skyscrapers to do battle with warped, larger-than-life arch-villains. A leprechaun rushed past beneath a painted sky seeking his pot of gold. The air was crisp, the ocean clear, the butterflies free of fear. Magic, having been sacrificed to science in her own world, hummed and throbbed in the veins of the mirror-world. She stood in the midst of it all, and sensed magic tugging at her soul, compelling her to heed its decree and stay to obey. She felt her resolve weakening, her self dissolving until she would become a joyous wraith in this sacred land, leaving a mere reflection beyond the glass on the other side. She dragged herself away with a heroic effort, forcing herself to be reborn in her own land. Smoke fumes wafted through the windows, and her unshaven neighbour slouched past on the sidewalk below. Magic must be brought back, she mused. Then she noticed the shattered shards at her feet, and the duality of magic and science struck her – two empires enthroned in their separate worlds of wonder, perfect inversions of the choices mankind has to make. Images of one in the other would never come closer than the thickness of the broken mirror.