Week+13+Poem

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The Symbol

Once upon a time there were two oval mirrors which hung facing each other on the walls of a local barbershop in the middle of a kingdom, we should add, which ran the length of a valley lined with the molars of high mountains. It's hard to say how the mirrors felt about all the faces peering into them, the unshorn, the clean-cut, and the bald, for mirrors cannot help doubling whatever stands or passes in front of them, including the perfumed heads of customers. And when business was slow the mirrors would see the barbers themselves glancing in to a run a comb quickly through their hair. Every day except Sunday the mirrors received the rounded heads and gave back the news, good or bad. And the reward for their patience arrived by night in the empty shop when they could look down the long corridors of each other— one looking at the dead mirrors of the past the other looking into the unborn mirrors of the future, which means that the barber shop must symbolize the present, in case anyone asks you— the present with its razors, towels, and chairs, its green awning withdrawn, its big window and motionless pole, and the two mirrors who lived unhappily ever after.

by Billy Collins hear the poet read this poem . . . ]