Poem: "Absent Hills"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This poem came out of the November 2, 2010 Poetry Fishbowl.  It was inspired by prompts from eseme, janetmiles, and aldersprig.  It was sponsored by eseme, and this is a first donation. Yay! For those of you who wanted to see the fairy doors in verse -- enjoy the trip, and don't get lost.

(Remember that the February fishbowl has been rescheduled for Tuesday the 8th.)

Absent Hills

There have always been fairy doors.

They used to appear in hollow hills,
in the time when hills were common,
but now the hills have been graded flat
and paved over with parking lots
or buried under apartment buildings.

So now the fairy doors appear in new places,
blending in with the background as always,
something glimpsed out of the eye's corner.
They are there in the baseboard beside the small closet,
in the bricks around the edging of the fireplace,
tucked among the stones of a wall,
hidden in coffee house crannies and library bookcases.
Where there are windows, sometimes
you can see lights inside behind the lacy curtains.

The urban fairies have modern tastes --
they like coffee and chocolate
as much as butter and cream.
They read glossy fashion magazines
and surf the web on thumbtop computers.
They hide their mushroom rings
under bottlecaps and pop cans
with no one the wiser.

Sometimes they use mail order,
their addresses distinguished by odd fractions,
but in today's world even the weird has become ordinary.
The fairies simply pick up their mail and slip away
behind the tiny, powerful doors
that divide the everyday world from underhill

even in the absence of the hills.