Poetry Thursday, free

 fleeing

~Kara Jackson

everything i do comes down to the fact that i’ve been here before.

in some arrangement of my atoms i was allowed to be free

so don’t ask me when freedom is coming

when a certain eye of mine has seen it,

a cornea in a convoluted future recalls my freedom.

when asked about the absence of freedom, the lack of it

i laugh at the word absence, which always suggests

a presence that has left. but absence is the arena

of death, and we call the dead free (went on to glory), what

is the absence of freedom but an assumption of it?

i have never longed for something

which was not once mine. even fiction is my possession,

and flight is an act of fleeing as much as an act of flying.

Copyright © 2020 by Kara Jackson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 3, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.