Snug the squirrel lies
In his mossy lair
Where no tooth of frost
Has ever reached.
From his lofty cell
He surveys all things
With their strife below
As a peace-flag swings
High on the pine.
In the cradle-fort
What a joy to rest
Rocking in the sweet
Spruce’s mother-breast
To Forestland’s music!
At a small window
The bobtail dozes
And the birds sing him
When the day closes
To Dreamland’s gold.
by Aleksis Kivi (1834 – 1872), Finland
The pillow hot
On both sides,
The second candle
Dying, the ravens
Crying. Haven’t
Slept all night, too late
To dream of sleep…
How unbearably white
The blind on the white window.
Good morning, morning!
by Анна Ахматова (Anna Akhmatova) (1909)
from Вечер (Evening, 1912), translation by D. M. Thomas
Once more spring has passed and it is now summer. A cool breeze drifts past the window.
I think of childhood and how the days of summer did not end back then.
Now, when the light begins to fail, I want to go for a walk in the cool night air.
Where to? I do not know.
Until what time? I do not care.
If I left I would not return. What is there to return to?
People have dreams and make memories in the dark hours. Especially during the summer when the darkness is a soothing comfort not a sign of insensitive death.
As a child you think adults have freedom while you yourself have routines and people to answer to.
You answer to your parents, your teachers, you community.
When you are an adult you still have chains but now they are invisible.
The barbed wire of etiquette twisted around you harming you every time you allow others to treat you as an inferior for decorum’s sake.
The razor blades of financial worries giving you the death of a thousand cuts.
The pressure of self-inflicted moral restraints contorting who you were, are and will be.
Existentialism poses the question asking what exactly is stopping you from dropping everything and walking away. These tethers we bind ourselves with are not real, physical, things. But they are there all the same.
An adult answers to their employer, to their family, to their peers and to the government that cannot see them as anything other than a statistic to be checked off the page.
The night air soothes the skin. Caresses it like a woman placating the injured thinking this tactile moment of amity, invading the solitude of suffering, will ease the tormented and assure their soul.
I will walk away from the lights of mankind’s pointless struggle against the beautiful night but in the end, no matter what direction I walk in, eventually I will return to it.
The only other choice is to blindly walk off a cliff into the awaiting pitch black sea who will claim me for her own. A phone will ring at the chapel down the bottom of the slope and the Samaritans will be told it was too late but they will go home in the end and sleep peacefully.
I cannot go because I will not return. There is nowhere to go. I am ensnared by responsibilities others have foisted on me because of the choices I made and the indecisions I allowed. I am in a gilded cage of my own creation and soon the night will past. I will wait. Wait until it returns once again. The cycle will continue until autumn kills it once more, dressing the floor with its golden red entrails and we bow our heads during the winter songs where the world is washed away to muddied grey and white tones.
The air is stale in here. I can breathe – but only with a heavy heart. I will embrace the night and sleep. I know when I awake the light wll have been victorious over the night and the cycle of maturity will repeat once more.
I have the past few evenings wanted to go for a walk. I have not though. I don’t know where I would go. There is nowhere but to the town with its glittering lights and dirty covered paving. To sit in a bar and drink until the ring of the bell for last orders and the long, lonely, walk back home. Tomorrow is another day – a day like any other day.
Unplanned piece. Flawed but then it fills the blog until the next entry.
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Rambling At The Bridge Head 