Litter
A bone with no meat.
Such a mean little word.
Though, by litter, what do I mean? Shall I mean refuse, clutter, brood, or straw? Or shall I mean the leavings of intention thwarted (a litter of words)?
A need, now, to blow between, as the wind blows, parting leaves, shaking deepest thought into the mouth, and by so brief a pause as breath allows, belying both sense and reason, giving to purpose the lie. Or must we from the tense, laid now either waste or fallow, take our bearings?
Yet we persist, holding hands up to the tide and to the wind, leaves of autumn falling now in summer, and in spring the winter snows, covering ground that, but for memory, would thrive, and death in idle bones for fear of death.
Tomorrow’s dust we sweep today, and in the sweeping lose the scent, the taste, the very breath of presence—of life so inescapably eternal as to seem fleeting.
That path in the near distance, death-inclined, is safe. Yet, as a cloud unbroken scours the eye, the tender shoots of presence, seeded in the countless spring, and in the countless summer bedded, and the bud, blown like a kiss, opening now to receive its winter, clings — blush of death on winter skin.
What, then is life but common instance of confounding, common loss and common finding, seasons blown? And what is love but blind refusal, blindly, to condone?
Stop now! Sweep the ashes of dead fires into the mouths of death, there to feed the dying embers of complaint.
Life eternal, death the shadow,
nothing lives that cannot die,
nothing wounds
that is not wounded.
Blame forbear, seek rather cause,
and, cause withstanding, live!
That flesh that, growing around
a healing wound, is raised,
knows more of love in its true sense
than we.
Too late for wounds, defences weak.
Too late for faces,
graven in the snow, to melt.
….. Too late.
After Neruda, Copyright © 2013 Marita Llinares