Friday, November 13, 2020

Old Oak Woman

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




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