Not One Tear for Remembering

 

Jill Battaglia image

Fix your eye on the north star and turn right before morning. The madman walks between daybreak and hellfire and has fallen. Never say to me that I don’t know soaring. I do, but I know it from the safety of the ground and the longing in my heart, always captive, tethered like a kite in full sail to the hand of the needy. Never tell me that I don’t know love for, alone and solitary, I have learned to love the whole world and I carry that love with me like a prayer, like a weeping elegy, like a song of hope that refuses to be muted.

Come my way and I'll show you a bit of the highway you may never have seen, through the eyes of blindness that have been opened. I'll teach you to listen to wolfsong and witch-howl, and we can join in towards the midnight hour, when the longing is too great to be contained within any longer.

I don’t know what I'm writing here, it is writing itself, and it is telling me that though I smile and insist on hope, within there is sorrow, constantly ebbing and flowing like the tide. A sorrow, under the bright smiles and determined hopefulness, as deep as the ocean, and as wide, that dare not, dare not, shed one tear for fear of drowning.

I wrote this in 2015. These days my sorrow is for the accelerating climate crisis, and its effects, especially on animals, both wild and domestic. I somehow felt like sharing it today. Sharing with earthweal's open link.