When time has stopped and will not soon begin,
our labored breath, its burdened rise and fall
records life and life again,
unwilling instruments, ourselves.
We try the walls and find them to be
choices that our hearts have made.
Worlds of promise tease our eyes
as if by wanting we were one with greens and slope,
as easy as the grazers there, or free explorers clothed as children are
in chasing creatures, cloud and sun.
We cannot go, or leave our lives untended,
make our way to some new valley’s home
to sink our hopes in darker soil there.
Owned.
Stilled within.
We wait.
I’ve been hearing this poem in my head lately. I wrote it years ago after my love told me he was moving to a city far away. It was before I knew how to be me without him. I’m not sure why I’ve been thinking about it. When I wrote poetry back then, I wrote it because I had to secure my reality with concrete images. I wrote it to rescue myself. I think I am looking for the place in me that is not that raw vulnerability, and yet is a deep enough place of reality that a poem or a saying would have value if read by another. This blogging idea is presenting an opportunity. Why I am thinking of that poem has to do with preparing myself to leave this house I’ve lived in for thirty years. I’m not going until July, but I am working my grieving all the time. It is a very good move. I’m going to Maine, a place I love ,to be where my daughter and granddaughter are. It’s the right time and place. It’s just that I can’t go there without leaving here.
3 comments:
And oh! you will be sorely missed! As if by wanting, I could keep you here and our shared time just the way it has been these seven years. But you will go and be happy in the going and I will stay and be happy in the staying and when we miss each other too much we shall visit. So much of what you say in both poem and paragraph finds some responsive chord in me, makes me ache and say, oh, yes!
I'm glad you posted to my blog so i could come find you. Pauline mentioned you in one of her posts, but it's a big cyber place out there.
I feel your pain . . . I really do, at what you will leave behind. But then, who knows what awaits that might be spectacular beyond expectation.
Touching heartfelt poem.
What a wonderful poem. "We try the walls and find them to be the choices that our hearts have made". Oh. That's amazing you were able to put it to words. You truly never cease to amaze me!
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