Tired
I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two –
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
— Langston Hughes
Always stand on the side of the egg
Please do, however, allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: Rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:
“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”
Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?
My morning begins slowly. When I eventually draw the curtains to let in the startling light of another day getting away from me, I notice that it must have rained overnight. The nasturtiums by the side of the house, which have grown thick and large and more like lily pads than something for a salad, are dotted with water that gathers in perfect brilliant droplets like polished glass.
It is almost winter.
It feels as though colour has been leached away. Beneath a dirty white sky everything is a darker, more muted version of itself. It is especially hard to find the beauty in things.
Birds provide some brightness. The blue of fairy-wrens, red-beaked finches, noisy wagtails. There were pelicans in the dam last week. And above the empty cornfield a sea eagle. Below, gathering the maize kernels that the flocks of cockatoos and ravens missed, ducks. Russet-breasted ducks with stark white collars who would reveal themselves as they periodically scan for predators, peeking above the stubble of the field.
The field is beginning to fill with grass and weeds. A carpet of green, slowly forming between the orderly rows of cut corn stalks.
There are moments on the trail, when there are no distant cars or trucks, no low whine of tyres on bitumen, no devices or whirring fans, moments when the only sound is birdsong and the busyness of insects, of tall dried grass stalks rattling against their companions, brief periods that quicken the heart.
they come
different and the same
with each it is different and the same
with each the absence of love is different
with each the absence of love is the same
— Samuel Beckett, 1938
The End of Poetry
Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost
letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and
the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.
— Ada Limón, link
Do not forget old friends
you knew long before I met you
the times I know nothing about
being someone
who lives by himself
and only visits you on a raid
— Leonard Cohen (1968)
Miracle Fish
I used to pretend to believe in God. Mainly, I liked so much to talk to someone in the dark. Think of how far a voice must have to travel to go beyond the universe. How powerful that voice must be to get there. Once in a small chapel in Chimayo, New Mexico, I knelt in the dirt because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. That was before I learned to harness that upward motion inside me, before I nested my head in the blood of my body. There was a sign and it said, This earth is blessed. Do not play in it. But I swear I will play on this blessed earth until I die. I relied on a Miracle Fish, once, in New York City, to tell me my fortune. That was before I knew it was my body’s water that moved it, that the massive ocean inside me was what made the fish swim.
— Ada Limón (2015)
Gray Room
Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl–
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you…
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.
— Wallace Stevens
