What do we do but make toast and cuddle on Sundays
& kiss in the pouring rain,
underneath the street lights of the inner cities?
What do we do but make tea with honey?
Read poetry,
Keats preferably.
Nature’s light
touches the back of the sea
and we have the feeling of remembering something
but we didn’t remember knowing it.
It is remembering that we are meant to be joy!
What do we do but turn towards love?
& run towards hope?
We run like Spanish Bulls,
we run, like the falling of stars
meshing into the fires of the unknown.
(Please I whisper to the clouds, let me be okay in the unknown.)
We bleed like the red of roses
falling into water
cleansing love that was lost
purifying the streams of our lust.
A soul is already carpeted in the divine and
who is to say sorrow isn’t God?
Who is to say love isn’t prayer?
Who is to say time is always on our side?
I watch the sun fall over the palms &
the flicker of a flame manifesting into the way she puts her
lips around her cigarette.
Even there, she is holy.
Even there she is noble.
Even there she questions if she is beautiful.
My god.
I thought.
If you only knew.
F
Fiercely Tender: The Simple Complex World of Michael Ondaatje’s Novels
Shortly afterwards in that novel we encounter a celebration of the body, grime and all, unimpeded by this abstraction called mind. While writing the body might seem not altogether unusual, my point is that you cannot simply assume its naturalness. Language, even fictional language, is so much of a mentally...
