~coffeecold

To be truly yours, this poem should be written in the language of silence.

“I have put my days and dreams out of mind” For all their hurry and their weary fret Availed me little. But another kind Of leaf that’s fast in some more sombre wind, Is man on life, and all our tenuous courses Wind and unwind as vainly. I have lived long, and died, Yea I have been dead, right often, And have seen one thing: The sun, while he is high, doth light our wrong And none can break the darkness with a song. To-day’s the cup. To-morrow is not ours: Nay, by our strongest bands we bind her not, Nor all our fears and our anxieties Turn her one leaf or hold her scimitar. The deed blots out the thought And many thoughts, the vision; And right’s a compass with as many poles As there are points in her circumference, ‘Tis vain to seek to steer all courses even, And all things save sheer right are vain enough. The blade were vain to grow save toward the sun, And vain th’ attempt to hold her green forever. All things in season and no thing o'er long! Love and desire and gain and good forgetting, Thou canst not stay the wheel, hold none too long!

Human love, human trust, are always perilous, because they break down. The greater the love, the greater the trust, and the greater the peril, the greater the disaster. Because to place absolute trust in another human being is in itself a disaster, both ways, since each human being is a ship that must sail its own course, even if it goes in company with another ship.

The still explosions on the rocks, the lichens, grow by spreading, gray, concentric shocks. They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed. And since the heavens will attend as long on us, you’ve been, dear friend, precipitate and pragmatical; and look what happens.  For Time is nothing if not amenable. The shooting stars in your black hair in bright formation are flocking where, so straight, so soon? – Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon.

We are not those who burnt, because flames were deemed too showy for wilting flowers except when fire was chosen as the only way to teach us again how to be silent We are those who march with our own pace, our hearts hollow diamonds capable of engulfing all the rivers of the Earth and love them equally We are those who were running on the island which still remembers us and calls to us, racing the wind and the goddesses, verses in our heads and violets tangled in our hands We are those defying the implicit rules in the chaotic city we loved and hated and spited and the world buried us under heaps of parchment which would make people feel for centuries We are mothers and daughters of the same name, walking different parts of Europe in different years, asking for rights or inventing the modern novel during a storm – how appropriate We are those who let words flow from our pen in letters similar to streams and novels to rivers, always water surrounding us, water we would ultimately embrace We are those conjoining under a bright and coloured southern sky after the grey and brown of a city where only others seemed to be able to write, because between us two we had the Earth and the Moon We are all of those, and more anonymous legions still, forgotten but alive, trampled on but with our eyes intact and our voices sharpened like knives We are, after all, daughters of so many goddesses; you thought you were naming storms after us – it is we who created them

Margaret Atwood

I shouldn’t put my heart to such tests, now that I’ve been informed of its imperfections; yet I take a perverse delight in doing this, as if I am a bully and it is a small whining child whose weaknesses I despise.

You want the air but not the words that come with it: breathe at your peril.