💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~spencerwi › poetry › target_practice.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 19:55:04. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Target Practice

I am gathered with you in a house of stained-glass

familiar songs fill my ears, customs of all my childhood years

truths told that chart my choices to the last,

as you, my companions, gather gravel,

searching for something to sling

at another glass house across the avenue.

Its walls, like these, are colored but clear,

But its color is all wrong, what sort of unholy throng,

you ask, not daring to look, just to fear,

and to take dutiful aim in defense of us all,

as your soaring stone shatters the nearby wall.

"We'll build another wall", you cry, "to keep out those beasts."

More glass shatters. Your munitions run low.

Prismatic pictures of grace splinter into shards of Love's broken face

all across the sturdy stony floor below.

You glance down at this light,

seeing ample supply for your fight,

piercing its cornerstone, sending its fragments in flight.

As you pass me a projectile,

to hurl at the house across the way

I quietly decline

So that I won't have to say

That hated house is mine.