Spending Life Looking Out One Window

by Thomas Redoubt

Pity the poor people who are spending

the best part of their one very short life

with eyes squinted, staring, peering, looking,

gawking, glaring, without seeing, without

caring that there’s so much more than the one

narrow view that's outside of their window.

Image credit: Li Lin on Unsplash

Even when the view from that lone window

stuns the senses, is a view worth spending

your last dollar to see, it's still just one

view, a foreground and a vista. The life

forms and styles it presents may fill it out

fully from rim to brim, like when looking

through a microscope at a slide, looking

at stars through a telescope, the window

revealing but a speck while leaving out

the rest of the universe. If spending

your full attention on that view is life

at its fullest for you, the only one

missing out is you. You complain no one

cares for you, understands you, is looking

to help you at all. You wail that your life

is bad because those seen through your window

are not like you, that they're hateful, spending

all to harm you. They're immoral. They're out

to bring society down and they're out

to make sure your God loses. There's not one

who you don't hate, except the ones spending

their hate on the same ones you hate. Looking

at your grimacing face in the window,

there are yet some who still look at your life

kindly, who from their understanding of life

from many points of view, see you without

malice, who know that it is your window

that limits you and that makes you the one

who suffers your hate most. Let those looking

in show you what you should be spending

your life on. Let them show you how to be one

of those who do not hate, to be looking

to find with them a full life worth spending.

***

Thomas Redoubt

Thomas Redoubt is from Freedom, Pennsylvania, a small town on the Ohio River north-west of Pittsburgh and now lives in Allison Park, Pennsylvania. He was trained in science and law spent the first half of his non-literary career as a materials science researcher and the second half as a lawyer and law school adjunct professor. Redoubt has a passion for writing poetry and sees poetry as the epitome of one person to communicate his/her thoughts and feelings to another.