“Those who cannot remember the past are forced to repeat it.”
SANTAYANA
Shipwrecked in daylight and docked in dark,
The blindman lacks a mirror in each eye,
But from the ticking clock and the crowing cock
He maps, in the dark, a visionary sky.
Seeing all the planets and the stars plain
Inside his head, and sensing the terrain,
He needs no walking stick to walk again.
No repetitions dawn, no dark comes back,
Distinguishing the twilight from the sun,
And yet he sees no uniforms of black;
He sees realities in unison.
And there are those who see far less than he
By seeing more, and choose a twisted key
To lock themselves from their necessity.
For memory distorts the ghosts that ply
The glassy lightness of their mirrors, they
Tempt the senses to a kind of play
In which the characters are scenery;
No audience awaits the end but one
Who stares at nothing, and will blindly run
Equally from darkness as from sun.
Some closet all their dead behind one door
And mourn the apparitions they have sown
And rattle on the knob while they implore
Freedom from a jail, which is their own.
Some ageless children murder dreams they gave
Away too soon, and harpies in the grave
Make merrier the birth-rites while they rave.
And some rewrite a calendar that time
Has never witnessed, drawing on the air
Impossible mythologies, and some
Drag through the Odysseys of their despair,
And locked up, finally, in self-made doom,
Wander in their dark from room to room,
Unweaving threads of their unsubtle loom.
And some rehearse a future that the world
Will weed out carelessly: uprooted trees
Flung in a field where winter wind has furled
Along the bough of hope its icicles;
And others, in great pain, will travel far
For false translations of the way they were,
And some will die not knowing who they are.
Leave a Reply