Permission to grow

By Anaëlle Gonzalez (20.05.2022)

The zebra membrane marbles,
Unable to resolve
This ambivalent maze.
Boundaries blur between
Old, current and altered selves. 

The ego of distant pasts 
Hoards and holds tightly
To the weak certainties
And polished identities. 

The time-worn enamel sheds
and sticks to the flayed membrane,
Afraid of dissolution,
Of memory loss and rejection. 

The new flesh exposed and unsure
Is half chrysalis, half hatched;
Coerced to come into 
But shy to impose its being.

 The worn out gives rise to 
The young yet older,
Intrinsically part of it, 
And still, not completely. 

New realities arise and
Insecurities ground them
By fears of forgetting,
Of unrecognized anthems. 

What if the old habitat
was better than the new?
What if of all versions,
Only one was true?

© Anaëlle Gonzalez. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You are free to share these poems for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, and without modification.