The Translator’s Shade

Living is translating. There is no answer,

There are only the choices that people make.

Meanwhile, all minds, like the cultures that make them,

The cultures they make, recombine, prismatic,

Their wavelengths only distinct when separate,

Rediscovering this or that lean of blur,

Interference a kind of Doppler Effect,

Telling you something about distance, maybe,

Kin to Fraunhofer Lines, those giveaway gaps,

Present elements scored in wavelengths absent.

Put your heads together, people, find yourselves

Lost, submerged, Lowellized, and desecrated,

Appropriating and assimilated,

But also something new no one of you was

As you were on your own, sprawled out for optics—

In other words, translated, another word

For death, as it happens. As it happens, life

Is death, or at least does all of the dying.

Shall we conclude optimistically, for once?

Yes! For, once translated, you’ve birthed a new shade.