Habibi,
I am bone weary –
But dogged determination is the only way
I know. I am weighted, holding gifts:
In one hand a full bucket of fresh qualla
And in the other a basketful of lapis lazuli –
Right and left, left and right
Each one representing the other.
Everything is washed with that cold
Comfortless dense white light of a dark
Winter mountain day
And my burden has broken me physically.
I stand in the mud shivering
Feeling like a character in a Beckett novel:
Less human perhaps than a constantly thinking tree,
Observing and rooting deeper and deeper and deeper,
Increasingly aware that this perseverance
Is probably all in vain.
Petrified, my many names becoming no name.
No one cares about the contents
Of my ever-ticking, tocking, loudly thinking mind.
I no longer have the will to ask
For peace as I literally creak and split
With time and weather and fatigue,
Shattered at last by my unappreciated,
Unrewarded steadfastness.
This must be what Daphne felt like,
Except I was neither runner nor chaser –
Though I wait, exhausted unto death
By my own pointless patience and listening
For silence within my reverberating head.
And if there is no release back
Into human form, at least maybe
People may tie windchimes
On all my branches
So that when they pass by
They will pause a moment to mark
What is left of this existence with the
Smallest of fleeting wonder.
-Sabne Raznik
http://www.facebook.com/sabneraznik
