What Is Not Poem by Sophia White

I once lived in an old brown wood
Where everything went just as it should
And my feet were grounded square
Among the sensible folk living there
In that no-nonsense, practical wood
A wood oft dark, a wood oft fair,
A wood known as “What Is.”

But every night, beneath the stars,
I’d leave the town and walk far
Into the dark and columned trees,
Rising up in twos and threes,
No one saw me thence depart
Beneath the stilled starry seas,
And no one knew I wandered.

I knew my way well and sure
So often had I walked before
The path slender as a thread
By none but me could it be read
Me, who had heard the water’s lure,
The lure of a pool to which I tread,
A pool none else in this wood knew.

My eyes beheld it every night
A pure and holy, blessed sight
A pool as still as the sky above
A pool as good as first, true love.
Reflecting heaven’s diamond lights
And all the other lights thereof,
A starlit pool, my heart’s delight.

The pool’s name: “What Is Not.”
It held all I’d ever sought,
All that the wood could not know
The places reality couldn’t go.
Dissatisfied with realism’s lot,
I’d look into the depths below
And take one precious sip.

Ambrosia! Elysium’s own!
Like the liquid, molten tone
Of celestial silver bells!
What worlds hid in its swell!
It coursed through blood, flesh, and bone,
In one eternal, fleeting knell
And I wept when it was done.

I dared not sup the water twice
Once a night must lone suffice
For I still lived in What Is wood
Where starlit pools are not good
And What Is Not’s sweet entice
Lured me where I never should
Have let my wanderlust rove.

But still I ventured back again
Through the stale and stark terrain
To sip the silver waters there,
That mystic and mysterious lair
That had before stolen men
From pale and worn reality’s care
And locked them in its depths.

Oh, how I played with courting fire!
The inevitable did indeed transpire.
One night, one sip just couldn’t sate
The thirst I had in my palate.
I tread too thin and weak a wire
And tumbled off into that mire
That mire of What Is Not.

And now I haunt those wondrous deeps
All the magic is mine to keep
The silver stars weave through my hair
And all is good and all is fair
And when the nights are inken deep
I rise to breathe the stagnant air
Of that old, dull wood, What Is.