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There's no one to be lonely with, No one who can barely smile, Only chattering conversations, When will tears be in style? I am weary of all the gladness, The grinning voices of the land, Tonight I wallow in sadness And the tragic mystery of man.
How can I speak of yesterday When I don't know what to say? How can I talk of tomorrow When words get in my way?
There's a language I never learned, A sadness I cannot reveal. There's a courage that has deserted me, I cannot tell what I feel. A tree is easy to chat with, The sky will say what it can. Even the moon is responsive, The silence is only man. Find a tree that you can love, Tell all your dreams to the sky, Give up your lust to the moon, And please be lonely as I
There's No one To Be Lonely With -James Kavanaugh, 1979 (for Patricia)
1 When the sun is absent the flower misses her and when the absence grows long the flower looks inside herself for another light.
2 My flower will not wither. It’s drawn in my notebook.
3 I am the plural who walks to you as a singular one.
4 Urgent artificial tears wanted for dry eyes. Natural tears leaked for centuries into the rivers and overflowed.
5 Before you shoot someone remember their mother’s eyes will follow you wherever you go until she drowns you in her tears.
6 They didn’t like his idea so they shot him in the head. From the hole the bullet caused his idea will reach the world and unfurl like a climbing plant.
7 Only one heart resides in each person but each is a train full of people who die when you kill what you think is one.
8 There’s a sun inside each book. Come and bring the new day that’s waiting for us to open.
9 She asked the night: Why are you so dark? Night answered: So that the stars’ light reaches you.
10 She asked the day: Why don’t you light? Day answered: Because I became your shadow.
11 Life is beautiful and painful like a feather pulled from a wing.
12 When the pistachios ripen we break their shells like we do to the hearts of our lovers.
13 If thieves come to your home let them take everything except your dreams. Keep those in a safe box.
14 She dreams and her friend completes the dream. When they separate, the Earth rotates slower and with half dreams.
15 The trees, like us, resort to their roots in times of danger.
16 During the pandemic we are a forest—trees standing alone together.
17 We watch our days: a snowman melting away as he should.
18 There are days we wait for and they come and there are days that happen to us that we cannot avoid.
19 The bubbles in the aquarium are the fish’s notes about the world.
20 Like a patient teacher the sun brightens our wrongdoings, same time every day.
21 When the bird is prevented from singing, his body turns into music, filling the horizon.
22 The birds never ask if you are going to heaven or to hell and they never divide the sky into stations.
23 When the birds chirp in your head, trust their message for you, especially if they tell you, for example: Flying is your true home.
24 What if the guns turn into pencils in the hands of the soldiers and they underline the places on the map as sites they must see before they die?
“I feel that poetry is not medicine- it’s an X-ray. It helps you see the wound and understand it. We all feel alienated because of this continuous violence in the world. We feel alone, but we feel also together. So we resort to poetry as a possibility for survival. However, to say I survived is not so final. We wake up to find that the war survived with us.” -Dunya Mikhail
FOR THOSE WHO WERE LOST DURING THE PANDEMIC, WE WILL NOT FORGET YOU Ever. Love Each Other or Perish ☮︎