frank giampietro

My Little Prince

"As for me, nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere, no one knows where, a sheep we never saw has or has not eaten a rose..."

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

The geese are practicing their V's,

and so are children in grade school

classes drawing pictures of moms

and pops and brothers and sisters.

 

Should I review our traffic rules?

Yielding at STOP signs, pretending

red lights might really be orange?

 

Ben's favorite color is blue.

Blue is always the first crayon

to wear down to a broken stub.

He draws a blue sky, blue water

tower, blue grass, blue eyes, blue mouth

and skin, blue sheep and blue boa

constrictor swallowing a blue

elephant (drawn from the outside).

 

Ben asks me if he's color blind;

he asks me to explain what that

means, but I cannot describe which

colors he can't see any more

than he can tell me what's missing.

 

 

One day we looked for the snow

 

And we couldn't find any.

Our sleds became relics

as half the world drowned

from the melting.

We could've too

if we'd been born along a coast

and refused to leave.

Instead, we mourned

 

the loss and watched

on our televisions,

the slow chaos unfolding

an inch at a time.

We watched;

we mourned;

we ate ice cream.

 

barton smock