In Praise of Exaggeration

Joel Vega

Trees, no, they do not exaggerate.
They stand in winter as they stand in autumn,
shorn but proud, their leaves transitioning
into another season.

Stones, too, do not exaggerate. They sit
in their shadows, unmindful of the world’s grievances.

But the stars, oh, how they exaggerate!
Even in sleep they refuse to lean into celestial darkness,
persuading us with splendid whispers,
of the sky’s generous canopy.

To magnify the world is to exaggerate,
to find ease in the warm blanket of our bones,
feel the tick of luck in our ribs.
To hum and till the blackened soil
until the garden joins our humming,
interrupting the hungry buzz of bees.

For how can we travel from day to day
if not for the companionship of exaggeration?
To lift the fog requires a kind of buoyancy,
a quality of toughness.

Ants know it, spiders too.
But theirs and our many labors change
or do not change the world,
and yet that switch in our mind says magnify.

Exaggeration carries that hope
in its slender hands, or it carries nothing