I have felt like waves washing over me,
releasing me, from doubt, from the tidal
pain of moon
I have felt washed at shore, left unconcerned
from the hum of doubt, never before has
loneliness looked like reward.
I lie limp but awake, these ripples in my mind
no longer seethe.
All my questions have been answered, my loves
rewarded, the pain of each separation erased
from memory.
what was it that hung on me, carried me to this shore
so dark?
What stung the moon ? what drove those waves?
why this repose? what night is this without a search for meaning?
This listless repose, these no thoughts of you,
my dreamless moments, my acheless painless night.
Sink me back and drown me, take me to my ledge
where doubts hang dark, where the tides fall back
and recede and rise again.
Give me that night that lives me or give me sleep,
give me love that loves me or drive me deep
into that deep rictus, which the moon prepares
from its dark haunting ground.
I prefer the loneliness of doubt than the
aftertaste of certain calm.
this poem is among your finest, Kubla. from the first to the last line, it achieves that most difficult thing to achieve: that pain and struggle and despair be told, shaped into words without any bits of rhetoric or sentimentalism dangling around them. there is also a change in the mood, isn't it? as if you had moved beyond the dark storm of memory which held you captive and now you are longing for its killing embrace again. i know that feeling too well. see, you say your poems are only confessions. perhaps by that you also mean that you don't care how the readers react to them, and if. but if they speak so deeply to them, then an encounter happens, and some truth is being born. no? and this is a great thing in itself.
ReplyDeleteHello, Roxana
ReplyDeleteEven a confession, a personal one, demands a hearing. hence, these lines here. I think you are right, there is a movement, though i must say that i failed to capture the essence of that change in mood.
the longing for the killing thing is there.
i think, there is ground for saying that i have basically written the 'same' poem again and again in various ways, over the years, subject to external demands and internal states. there is a fluctuation of course.
i have tried to write about, say, a landscape that i like, but it ends up in a personal interrogation, a 'demand' from that scene.
have you read Grantchester meadow by plath? the subjective loneliness is lost on the objective field. the gap inbetween is sometimes bridged by words. but we try.
and thanks.