Looking Up

The past fades, and I am here, shorter with age...

Looking Up

I love my friends who tower taller than I.
Even when I stand tiptoed to heaven,
so much of the world is beyond my grasp
without perching precarious upon a shaking chair.
Still I stretch and stretch, until I reach back
to nine years old when André the Giant
came to Dothan. 7 foot 4, he towered so tall
the stars stopped to listen when he challenged
local villains to face him in the canvas ring at the center
of the galaxy. Fans circled André in sweating orbit
and cried for more in that 110° farm center
on the dusty edge of space.

The past fades, and I am here, shorter with age.
Last month’s knee-high roses are eye-level.
Their petals, dark as memory
with a fragrance of earth and tea,
make death a forgotten dream.
A hummingbird lights, delicate and so small,
I must seem a monolith. When it flies, wings whirr,
and I visit that hidden place which only opens
when the world treats me with such tiny tenderness.
Come take my hand, and let us take giant steps.

Collage by Matt Layne

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Matt Layne writes…

Height has fascinated me since I looked around Mrs. Spann's first grade classroom at Girard Elementary in Dothan, Alabama and thought to myself, "We are really really small." By second grade I had the more revolutionary thought, "We are really really small, but there are way more of us than them. We should be in charge." Alas, I never became a second, third, or even fourth grade revolutionary leader, but I did continue to notice and gravitate towards those who loomed literally large in my landscape. I remember staring up in wonder at a high school basketball player I encountered, and when Andre the Giant came to my little southern town? I mean, come on. He could talk to the stars themselves. Let us stop for a moment on this day and remember the thrill and power of the hummingbirds and the giants around us. Let us stop the stars and breathe in the perfume of love and memory and righteousness and roses.

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“Looking Up” appears in Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022. The music is Ned Mudd’s “Copernicus” from the album Buffalo T-Bone.

Miracle Strip, a poetry collection by Matt Layne, is a unique hybrid of the written and spoken word. Each piece of the collection has an end-stop embellishment QR code which, when scanned, transforms the reader into a listener. Layne has recorded each poem, often with the accompaniment of musician and poet, Ned Mudd. The first line of the book invites the reader to “tell me your story, and I will tell you mine,” in the campfire tradition. In Miracle Strip, the reader and poet embark on an experiential journey of memories and the ghosts who haunt us.

Miracle Strip by Matt Layne is in print! Get your copy today!

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Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet's nests and looking under rocks for lizards and snakes since he was knee-high to a peanut peg. His debut multimedia poetry collection, Miracle Strip, had been awarded the 2025 Alabama Author Award for Poetry and was named the 2024 Book of the Year by the Alabama State Poetry Society. Order your copy today.

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