Rite of Way

passage to another world, another time
a world in which the building
in whose footprint
I stand
still itself stands

© Matthew Word Bain

from one absent building
to another, empty and vacant
or, perhaps, the other way around
from one unoccupied space
to a building no longer extant
such a dangerous passage
the portal must be
not merely boarded up
but secured with masonry

© Matthew Word Bain

you and I, though
need not halt our journey
on account of the merely material
we know how to walk through walls
we are able to travel through time
we have the intelligence of our bodies
to reveal to us the past in the here and now
and to glimpse and even inhabit possible futures