The Prophecy

Long ago, once, an elderly widow

Who owned a home in Lansing, Michigan,

Suburban-style house, smack in downtown, died.

Her estate attorney rented part out

To a young couple who lived in the back--

A dark, chilly, two-room with kitchenette.

The attorney didn’t know the couple

Were actually runaway teenagers

Who worked minimum-wage at Burger King,

Owning and affording nothing, who ate

Most of their diet from food scrounged at work.

They were just to keep someone in the house

And pay a little rent, while paperwork

On the estate kept it off the market

A few months. One of the couple, a boy,

Discovered he could break into the front

Parlor of the house through a back-room’s door.

The lawyer kept the front of the house warm,

Mysteriously, with no one in it.

Mornings that winter, on days without shifts,

The boy would slip into the dusty warmth

And direct sunlight of the gold parlor,

With a paper sack of smuggled burgers

From work, and settle on the large sofa

To spend hours with a dog-eared paperback

A customer had left at Burger King,

Frank Herbert’s Dune. In level sun and dust,

In an overheated, overstuffed room

Filled with a dead woman’s dense furnishings,

The boy read, as if hallucinating,

An invented world of invented words.

Shadout Mapes. Kwisatz Haderach. Muad’dib.

All the rest of them, as the dust floated,

And outside was winter, old, grimy snow.

He lived a long time, that boy, there and then,

A long time after, as well. He survived

To view a version in a theater

In an open desert, two thousand miles

And decades removed from that dusty room.

It was the light of the widow’s parlor

That came to haunt him in the theater.

The wondertale prophesies its own past.