Photo: Inge Vandormael
She had come to make a new life.
She found illness. She found death.
And life, perhaps, hiding in the shadows
Of her convalescing sorrow,
Waiting
To take hold.
She had come in search of meaning.
She found a babble of confusion.
Within. Without.
Rising skyward. Buried underground.
She found hope, too. For things she didn’t know
Even had names
But sprouted meaning
In the corners of what she believed
Was ruined,
But had in fact been opened
To allow in the winds of change.
She came seeking answers,
And found the cost
Of living
Paid for little more than added questions,
And that she had to look
Quite closely
At what wasn’t there,
To find
What she did not even know
She had been searching for.
Photo: The old Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island (a narrow island set in the East River between Queens and Manhattan).
For What Pegman Saw: Manhattan Island
