What questions beg answers
When answers won’t do
What comes from not knowing
What truly is true
How long can you look
Away from the cause
Pretending the fabric
Is whole with no flaws
Not rent and ripped
Into thousands of shreds
The weave all dismembered
To bare hanging threads
That float, waft and flutter
Without any wind
Reduced down to nothing
Sapped, winnowed and thinned
Material ruined
Bereaved and bereft
More holes now than fabric
Nothing is left
©Edwina Peterson Cross
posted by Unknown @ 3:38 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
I scribbled these two poems in my notebook in the hospital, on Sunday at 3 a.m., with a hand that would barely close because of an IV line. Five different people had tried to start the IV when the last one collapsed, the fifth one finally put it in my wrist when no veins would hold. It was a bit of a leap of faith to post these, for I was taught that I must always be happy, show nothing but sunshine, give nothing but my joyous words.
I thank you whole heartedly for offering to take the shuttle, my friend, and I will pass it willingly. (It’s a stunning metaphor, by the way - ‘reach through the loom and pass the shuttle to me’ - lovely words, image and thought.)
I think I am going to keep these tatters of words that came in the deep darkness, however. We have been speaking here of the shadows that are necessary for the light; these words, uncrafted and bare, are perhaps the back side of the leaf to something that shimmers.
This I learned in the mines: (I quote myself) “an artist cannot create with selected pieces of their being. You cannot reach inside for the power that moves and say, ‘this I cannot touch’ or ‘here I will not go.’” I learned this from years of having things I would not touch and places I would not go. I have yet to completely learn the nerve to show what comes up from the darkness; not the uncovered sparkling gems, but that which is ragged and broken. I don’t know for certain that these things have any worth. I do know they have truth. That seems, somehow, to be the beginning of something.
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