A Different Vision

Contributor: Catherine O'Brian

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Hers were pale blue eyes impaled by sunlight,
squeezed almost shut behind dark glasses
on merciless blue skied and cloudless days.
She saw this as an oversight of natural selection,
while coping with a compensatory inner vision
peopled by imagined forms embodying her fears.

Gray objects floating in the moonlight
were discerned by her as mere shadows
of the daylight visions of the healthy ones,
those sensible creatures of the light,
surefooted and without self doubt,
free to play at the limits of their imagination and then
return to the solidity of reality unscathed.


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Catherine O’Brian is a scientist and a poet who works at a nonprofit in Chicago. Her poems have been published in The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Ann Arbor Review, and elsewhere.