It was beautiful.

It was lame.

I sat in a broken down temple

With eleven other tourists,

And in the spirit of Asclepius,

We spoke only our given names,

And then each, in our own corners of the ruin,

Began to emote, and to act out

In dramatic fashion 

The opera that were in our hearts,

The plays our lives had been.

And ivy grew on the hallowed walls of colleges,

And tall pines sheered up the sky,

But the backdrop to our stories 

Were the omens of birds in flight

And a chorus of clouds.

We flocked together.

The sound of our mistakes

Rose resonantly up and out,

Like the quacks and honks

Of ducks and geese on a lake,

Just as the serenity of sunrise gives way

To morning’s official and practical start.

Just so, we began to feel as naturally at home

In our broken hearts,

Suddenly seeing the beauty of all our attempts

At failure and success.

-jenn