Queen of Crows III
Love captive exacts
It’s terrible revenge
All thoughts a kindness
All records a wrong
Our hearts in twine
Blood’s river Rhine
One step
To brink and back again
To curse a friend
With Neverwhen
Oblivious to shared sorrow
Millstones begat
Unnerving and flat
What hope will lift tomorrow
Bound cage of air
Twirled ’round and spared
The stones of outraged fellows
Marvel at the sign
Held up by mine
‘Tween dark and restless hollows
Her Two Cents
I’ve been obsessing on the words, “Bound cage of air | Twirled ’round and spared.” One typically sees a cage as a restraint, with air being the substance that moves freely. But what of those times when it’s the air itself (or our perception of it) that has the power to contain or release us? A cage can be more than a physical structure.
What about that perception? Yes!
I was reading Christian Wiman earlier, who resonates with an aspect of your note as he cautions:
“”Be careful….There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction…or, as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world” (My Bright Abyss, p. 9-10).
Precisely.