Plunging obscurity
This photo is by Abby Ciona, a student at Redeemer University. Last Fall, she participated in a street photography project in downtown Hamilton. “I was interested in trying to photograph what burdens the people of the city might be carrying, and I noticed that often, people carried the weight of their visible and invisible struggles in their phones.”
Screen-stained fingertips,
blue-lit fingerprints.
Is humanness obsolete?
A like; a follow; a friend.
A city’s patronage
blunted by estranged neighbors.
When did doom-scrolling
supplant bread-breaking?
Has wine lost its potency?
Salt, its vigor?
*
A world ever shifting
toward fame in the Cloud.
Screened ostensibility
beckons another way of living.
Perhaps
while the world attempts
a feeble mark in a technicolor dream,
God calls his own into the mystery,
en masse, disappearing
into tiny pockets of the world,
to know and be known.
*
A handshake; a prayer; a tear.
I feel, or fear,
the God whose face is veiled
may beckon me to do this:
to welcome abundance –
plunging obscurity.
Thank you for your insight and deftness with words. I’d send this as an Instagram post if I knew what Instagram was, or if you’d appreciate it.