Ordinary dragons

if one were to ask,
when did you first meet?
or
how long have you known one another?

one might not hear the same answer
day to day
it’s hard to convey
how time passes together

waking, most days, early
I sometimes prepare a breakfast for a dragon
her iridescent scales
still colored with bedsheets

life breath, in gentle harmony with this home
some noise from the kitchen
rouses her
and our common appetites

cleaning our plates
and tidying the kitchen,
she tending to the flowers,
we may have thoughts

this is kindness
it’s nice to meet here
in timelessness
in the place we first met

it’s hard to convey
how time passes together
and this sovereign home we keep
in the place we first met

Post Script

This poem grew from actual early mornings shared with someone I loved: waking, making breakfast, washing plates, tending flowers, and allowing ordinary care to become the place of meeting. The dragon was not an interruption of domestic life. The dragon was the living person encountered there, rare and mysterious even while carrying a plate into the kitchen.

Behind the poem was also the Zen story of the true dragon. Seiko surrounded himself with images of dragons but became frightened when a living dragon appeared. I was wondering whether two people could welcome the real, unknowable other instead of loving only the image they had formed. The answer offered here is ordinary kindness: preparing food, cleaning together, remaining curious, and giving the other enough room to remain a dragon.

“The place we first met” is therefore not only a location in the past. It is the present moment in which expectations loosen and another person appears again. The sovereign home is not a fortress or possession. It is a space continually kept through mutual attention and care.

I wrote this during a peaceful period in a relationship that later became unhealthy and deeply painful. Returning to the poem now requires holding both truths without forcing either one to erase the other. The tenderness of these mornings was real to me, even though it did not describe the relationship as a whole.

The accompanying statue of Asclepius quietly joins the poem through the serpent, an ancient companion of healing. The image does not illustrate the breakfast scene. It gives the dragon another register: mysterious, embodied, and close to the work of care.

Read beside rise in gray skies, this poem preserves one end of an emotional arc: the shared home as it was once experienced, before that world could no longer be inhabited.

Image credit: Statue of Asclepius at the Museum of the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (2008), by Michael F. Mehnert. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.