Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Terrible Secrets

The Ice Age is Now and Forever

True faith, I am convinced,
Happens in a moment,
Like lightning striking
Blue-white out of a tumultuous sky,
Or like madness,
Taking us
In the snap and surrender
Of a world-weary mind.

They are exceptional, the truly faithful.
Like the mad.
Like the sky-struck.

The rest of us, the earnest seekers,
The doubters, the restless spirits,
Ride upon a glacier,
Huddled against the cold.

Some are convinced that we are not, in fact,
Moving at all; others shiver and dream
Of the day when the glacier might rumble
Over the northern cities and into
The sunlit lands.

We are moving and we don’t see it
Or feel it. This
Is not a ship; there is no one
At the wheel. We slip,
Unheeding, over smaller catastrophes.

***
The Terrible Secret
or
I wish I could make you sleep a little less well

Lying awake one night,
Unable to sleep,
I discovered a terrible secret.

And that secret was this:

There is only a certain amount of sleep in the world
And a certain amount of love.
So every time you love someone with all of
Your heart,
Somebody else loves their loved ones
A little less.
But they sleep well,
To make up for your restless nights.

And I fell asleep.

2 Comments:

At 6:38 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The second one - The Terrible Secret - fascinates me. I don't necessary agree with what it says but I love the words and it intrigues me. It makes me want to see what sort of music it would bring about. [I'm studying music composition.] In fact, I'm thinking about asking your permission to use it for those purposes, to set your text, but it's still mulling about in my brain a bit for now.

 
At 10:09 PM, Blogger Arthur Mundane said...

Interesting.

 

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