Truth Christenson

Just as the king out on a hunt picks up
a glass to drink from, any one at all -
and afterward its owner puts it away
and guards it like some fabled chalice:

so perhaps Fate, who also thirsts, at times
raised a woman to its lips and drank,
whom then a small life, too much afraid
of breaking her, locked away from use

inside the tremulous glass cabinet
to which its most precious things are kept
(at least the things considered precious).

There she stood strange like something loaned
and became merely old and became blind
and was not precious and was never special.