(no subject)
Mother, I'm letting go.
It's what you did nearly a year ago.
Now I know how, I swear
Walking so long in the dark, I arrived
To this now.
I don't have to tell you
The forces that were in my life,
You know.
You who could describe the moon
With so much care
And spoke everything-but not of your fear of dying
You know why flowers grew on grass
To say, "I'm born"
Or that they might spring from crevices of rock to dance with the wind.
Sometimes your words split darkness the way you crack open a rock
Nothing diminished or unseen.
Like the time we described the good and happy life of a friend
And you said, "I know, I know, but he's a hurt person."
He'll never know how you saw into him.
What Thoreau said he longed to do, you did-
Speak "first thoughts,"
While ours lay like cocoons spread in confusion.
You never said the reasons for failure-why we get lost
Only that we are, and whether your thoughts spilling like butterflies into
air
Or cut like an axe
Your never lost the knowledge of center
That the failure to love ourselves deeply enough
Is more or less fatal
Well, the eventual is now
And I am broken like the moon,
Driftwood in the sea of my own drowning
Let me feel the attention you gave
To this world.
(Were you afraid of dying in case what came afterwards took less?)
But at the last moment you let go of your breath
With the same care you gave all along.
Safe with yourself.
I'm turning to that shore.
by Constance Greenleaf
It's what you did nearly a year ago.
Now I know how, I swear
Walking so long in the dark, I arrived
To this now.
I don't have to tell you
The forces that were in my life,
You know.
You who could describe the moon
With so much care
And spoke everything-but not of your fear of dying
You know why flowers grew on grass
To say, "I'm born"
Or that they might spring from crevices of rock to dance with the wind.
Sometimes your words split darkness the way you crack open a rock
Nothing diminished or unseen.
Like the time we described the good and happy life of a friend
And you said, "I know, I know, but he's a hurt person."
He'll never know how you saw into him.
What Thoreau said he longed to do, you did-
Speak "first thoughts,"
While ours lay like cocoons spread in confusion.
You never said the reasons for failure-why we get lost
Only that we are, and whether your thoughts spilling like butterflies into
air
Or cut like an axe
Your never lost the knowledge of center
That the failure to love ourselves deeply enough
Is more or less fatal
Well, the eventual is now
And I am broken like the moon,
Driftwood in the sea of my own drowning
Let me feel the attention you gave
To this world.
(Were you afraid of dying in case what came afterwards took less?)
But at the last moment you let go of your breath
With the same care you gave all along.
Safe with yourself.
I'm turning to that shore.
by Constance Greenleaf