The truth is such that the moment we turn our backs on it it ceases to be the truth that we thought it was. The truth is such that the moment we take our next breath it changes and it changes the breath that we just took. Shadorma November, Day 6 (seven days late....) (...or does that make it six?...)
This very moment, as you take in a breath to speak the next line or just to whisper it or just to sigh a little, a girl is letting out all of the breath in her lungs for the very last time as the building around her collapses. A man who is really just a boy is holding his breath without realizing it because he cannot grasp the fear that he feels as he starts to pull the trigger. He has no words for what he feels and she has no time to make words. And me? I am still breathing in. (I wish, on this day, to remind myself that what was for us an extreme punctuation to our otherwise and comparatively serene lives is in fact a fact of life--yearly, monthly, weekly, daily--the substance of the narrative--for so many people in so many places.) (This is, in a sense, a follow-up to this post, many years on) This poem first appeared on my friend Jeremy Nathan Marks' project, Poetry of the Resistance.
Sharp sounds impact only the thin skin of this drum, this timpanum, and then bounce like mallets, making music of this cave, plucking the threads of this skein. They will have no other impact. In this chamber, their soft timbres, their reverberations and distortions are breath.
the breath comes in through the nose, a wave, washing, takes the mind with it, rolls in and lifts the head like helium and the head is let go for the breath goes through the chest, follows the spine, expanding as it goes, past the pumping of the heart and the heart is let go for the breath goes, pulled down by the the belly, the body’s center of gravity, grows very warm very slowly near, below the stomach ‘midst the twists and turns of now minded, mindful and embered guts and the mind goes with it and the mind is let go for the breath goes and grows the whole abdomen, front, back, top, sides and yes, down to the colon and the whole is let go for the breath grows, roots into the earth and the earth is let go for the breath ----------------------------------------------------------- My response to Panda's Prompt: (all those other prompts were SO last year....yes, I waited just so I could say that ;-)) "The challenge is to write a poem about a journey through the human body as metaphor. You must mention at least the bum or colon, stomach, chest, heart and head – and other bits if you like. It can’t just be a description of the bits, but otherwise, make free!"
