All his dreams
have wings
affixed with wax.
By sunrise,
fear and fever
melt them off.
Nestled in
his bed of nettles,
the itch of wishes
unfulfilled,
takes him to the edge
of madness,
a cliff
ten thousand feet
above the blackness
of the canyon floor
where writhing vermin
wait to eat his soul.
And we become part of something we don't understand, but have known we have belonged to, always!
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ReplyDeleteW. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
(*I wish we could rather mourn the creation of martyrs, instead of having to memorialize such people as we martyr and mourn. We constantly force independent thinkers to haul the baggage of identity, by making fame the only legitimization for independent thought. For some, it's too much to bear. Some don't even make it into the spotlight except as small martyrs to it. Better to not seek approbation at all, and live.)
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