Read Poetry: The Girl on the Bus, by Ed Teja

She turned her face toward the light,
the moving, blinking, shadowy light.
I watched patterns of darkness
pool above her high cheekbones,
her eyes deep, dark hollows
containing all her sorrows.

“It’s an enigma,” I offered, speaking
in a reassuring tone and with a beat to match
the motion of an ancient city bus
rocking down dark streets striped in light.
“It’s all truth can ever be,
our poor, sad truth.”

The look she gave me said that this lady knew all that.
Life in a hostile city had taught her well
how truth, obscured by light and shadow,
often hid in the confines of contrast.

For a moment she faced me,
half smiling some sad rejoinder.
Then, when the light changed,
she flickered with it from the bus.

Genres: society, angst