The Habit of Thinking Light
A Collage Poem
By
Jennifer Angelina Petro
From words by Sam Lilley, from his book,
“Discovering Relatively for Yourself,” published 1981, with a few words by me
Light behaves in many ways.
It is a steady motion
full of fruitful suggestions—
some of them far more subtle
than others—but for all of them
the conclusion is clear:
We move through light.
And it’s all happening in outer space—
it’s an everyday experience
and a startling idea, with many
radiations intuiting the absurdity
of how the edges move,
of how we are traveling
towards the right and good,
with many little kindnesses
becoming the habit of thinking light.
The upshot of it all:
we are love’s out and back journeys,
we are not impossible conclusions,
we are instantaneous events
occupying small intervals of time,
imagining things in new ways,
we are dilations of light,
reaching towards the kind of together
where we surprise one another
with messages of hope coming directly
from the first flash of love and wanting,
that still carry us to somewhere,
to here.