APOPHATIC MEDITATION
How long have you been gone?
How long did i not trust myself?
How long did you stay after the come-back?
Does all that matter now, does it even make sense now?
This obsession, the thought of you lodged like a thorn,
how long?
Blank pages stare at me like orphaned children.
The rising of the sea in a calm weather, the sudden rush ,
the rocks, the sky,
suddenly the sandy floor shifts.
A life-time lived and gone
in a single grain of sand.
The strife of will, the entire language of your being
read like a syllable in a flash of a lightening,
and the book of life, an abysmal gap,
and the words which could fill in , forever lost.
I am haunted by the feeling that I read you wrong,
and the doubt creeps in to say,
"Or did I in fact read you right at the end of it all?"
I had no name for you, no pronoun to engage and draw you in.
My world always cherished an empty space
in place of the pronoun I might use
to mark you, script you
into the space deferred
always for some future use.
Fear, it was always fear that strangled the voice of love.
Fear subverted into a battle, and I built walls all around.
Like a feline walking with a muffled sound
I roamed around your ranges of mind and heart.
You subdued me; subdued my pride,
and you did it in your way, unknowingly you did what needed to be done over the long ages in my past.
It was not indignity;
it was the necessary skill
Silent, attentive to every nuance of the thought
that made an appearance in your sky
I charted a flight-path to reach you there
where already the height had called you, beckoned you to reach in the sky.
Your nobility, patience, which I failed to see and understand;
I stumbled and fell and gave up the path.
When I gathered the stamina to rise again,
my strength with every fall and rise
was diminished, and my sight was dimmed
with the trauma of falling despite the effort to understand.
A friend with a heart of gold,
your heart kept growing,glowing with your very own light,
and I kept myself in the shadows,
not knowing if that small gesture of warmth
which touched me like magic
was the miracle after all
that I glimpsed but deferred as not the moment yet,
a moment destined but not yet come.
And the impossibility of finding you,
finding you in the truest sense
drove me almost to insanity.
My nemesis to be sure was to come through the error
of not doing the right gesture at the right time,
and the gesture that finally did happen
was no gesture at all,
Striking in a fury, I did bruise
where it could hurt the tenderest link
that continued to hold me on to you.
How long have you been gone?
How long did i not trust myself?
How long did you stay after the come-back?
Does all that matter now, does it even make sense now?
This obsession, the thought of you lodged like a thorn,
how long?
Blank pages stare at me like orphaned children.
The rising of the sea in a calm weather, the sudden rush ,
the rocks, the sky,
suddenly the sandy floor shifts.
A life-time lived and gone
in a single grain of sand.
The strife of will, the entire language of your being
read like a syllable in a flash of a lightening,
and the book of life, an abysmal gap,
and the words which could fill in , forever lost.
I am haunted by the feeling that I read you wrong,
and the doubt creeps in to say,
"Or did I in fact read you right at the end of it all?"
I had no name for you, no pronoun to engage and draw you in.
My world always cherished an empty space
in place of the pronoun I might use
to mark you, script you
into the space deferred
always for some future use.
Fear, it was always fear that strangled the voice of love.
Fear subverted into a battle, and I built walls all around.
Like a feline walking with a muffled sound
I roamed around your ranges of mind and heart.
You subdued me; subdued my pride,
and you did it in your way, unknowingly you did what needed to be done over the long ages in my past.
It was not indignity;
it was the necessary skill
Silent, attentive to every nuance of the thought
that made an appearance in your sky
I charted a flight-path to reach you there
where already the height had called you, beckoned you to reach in the sky.
Your nobility, patience, which I failed to see and understand;
I stumbled and fell and gave up the path.
When I gathered the stamina to rise again,
my strength with every fall and rise
was diminished, and my sight was dimmed
with the trauma of falling despite the effort to understand.
A friend with a heart of gold,
your heart kept growing,glowing with your very own light,
and I kept myself in the shadows,
not knowing if that small gesture of warmth
which touched me like magic
was the miracle after all
that I glimpsed but deferred as not the moment yet,
a moment destined but not yet come.
And the impossibility of finding you,
finding you in the truest sense
drove me almost to insanity.
My nemesis to be sure was to come through the error
of not doing the right gesture at the right time,
and the gesture that finally did happen
was no gesture at all,
Striking in a fury, I did bruise
where it could hurt the tenderest link
that continued to hold me on to you.
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