The Midas Touch

The Sunday Scribblings prompt is "miracle".

The Midas Touch

King Midas touched his young and tender daughter
and froze her to cold, still gold.
My father told it to me as a bedtime story
as he sat on the edge
of the narrow 1920s’ child’s bed
while I rested my head on my arm
(since pillows might cause humped shoulders
or spinal curvature).

Time is Midas’s touch,
a great transparent pane (called “Now”)
infinitely thin
that sweeps through our living world,
future before it,
the past behind it,
congealed at the moment of its passing
into “Past”, immutable as gold.

History might tell lies, memories might distort
but, in that universe of frozen action,
the truth cannot be changed.
Crystallized beyond that wall
that we can only see and never penetrate
is a young father, telling his little daughter
about King Midas.