Creativity: "Ex Nihilo" by Tina Quinn Durham

I wrote this prose poem in 1991, when my family was flying into Washington, D.C. at night to visit my sister.  If you're familiar with the city, you know that Pierre Charles L'Enfant modeled it after European cities "avenues radiating out from rectangles" ("Washington, D.C." - Wikipedia).  The original plan for the city looked like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:L%27Enfant_plan.jpg#file

Imagine this a few hundred years later - radiating avenues pulsating with electric lights like a constellation of earth-bound stars - and you'll get the central image of this poem.

EX NIHILO

They want me to write poems where everything flows together until love and lemonade are a single, contradictory celebration stinging my tongue - but it’s not like that.  Everything fits together and you can see it the way you see roads coming together into the airport.

It’s all one star raying out into a night that dances with small clouds, and one day we won’t wonder why parts of the expansion pulse bright then dim, because then it will be all light, illumination forever, not surge and brown-out but light pure and simple.

It’s more than positive paranoia, it’s a rush of everything caught in the strobe of truth - we hang poised for a moment before plunging back into the dance - we're going to dance it forever until we come to the place where forever begins.

©2013 Tina Quinn Durham.  All rights reserved.