Poetry Break: It’s the year 2051 by Geoff Kagan Trenchard

It’s the year 2051, and in our family’s timeshare on Mars
my granddaughter has found my old copy of the Kurzban Immigration Law Sourcebook,
16th Edition.

I’m sitting in the observation room in the late afternoon, large beverage in my hand.
The dissolving ice cube is a small miracle I can barely comprehend.

She enters in a cloud of red dust, flops into my lap like a baby elephant,
and fans the pages. There’s an avalanche of underlines and highlights

of things that I clearly needed to remember at one point,
but have no recollection of now.

She asks me what is it, and I say, it’s a book of spells.
I tell her once upon a time, this was more powerful

than the largest army. Because this told the army where the border was.
What’s border, she asks. Border is a kind of game that grown-ups used to play.

Was it fun? she smiles in mischievous wonder. I say, well some people really liked it.
People would get all dressed up and depending on where you were from,

you would wear different colors, or sing different songs.
Let’s play! She squeals as she bounds off my lap.

I say, but here’s the thing about borders. Once they are there,
It can get very intense. Like, remember yesterday when your brother

wanted to play with your giant lego spaceship and rather than sharing it,
you smashed it? Her eyes drop with her breath.

That’s what borders did to mountains.
That’s what borders did to families.

And the spell book helped? Cheeks hopeful hilltops. Yeah, I say. I studied
for a long time, and then I could do magic.

I cloaked a princess invisible so she could sneak past a blacked out dragon.
I turned the heart of a giant old toad inside out until he freed a prince from his dungeon.

I conjured golems of dead trees to protect two queens on their long journey home.
I made a mad king’s money vanish, and he even thanked me for it.

Her face crooks. What’s money? I say, money is a door
that only locks when you want it to.

Not missing a beat she asks, what’s a lock?

The condensation from my drink glass has mixed
with the blood-colored dust and has stained my hands.

I can’t stop thinking about all the times the magic didn’t work.
And how I will have to explain them to her someday.

The mother buried alive in the church that I failed to resurrect. The father with a son
was the same age as mine, but for whom I had no inn to offer. The crusade of children

in the desert I made no pilgrimage to comfort. And now my own worst voice comes out of their mouths
And tells me I was never any kind of wizard. Just a jester to a court bent on killing its audience.

That while I may claim to have saved a few drops,
there was an ocean that dried up on my watch.

What good is a book against men who burn them?
On Mars, the sun has set. I can’t find Earth. But I know it’s out there.

That blue fist holding so fast against what seems like infinite darkness.
What’s a lock?, I say,

My love, I don’t know if I can explain it well right now.
Please ask me again tomorrow.