Small boys sell silver bullets
at the road side, for emergency
use only. In the Land of the Free
clockwork sheep graze sleepless fields.
Do they dream of a lambing
snow tumbling from neon skies?
Do they recall punch-drunk
poppies beyond the electric fence?
The mocking bird twitters
from his gilded tower. Syncopated
rhythms pump black gold. Blood
moons rise. Hunters summon the blue
-eyed to the door. She drives north
as a skein of geese flies the other way.
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
Leonard Cohen, Anthem
And here’s the legendary voice of Cohen:-
Naked before the mirror, her limbs bent in wilful
directions. She was a misshapen tree, bent
by a bomb blast in some forgotten war, misshapen
but surviving in the ruins of a bombed out town
in a ruined land with a name impossible to spell.
Like the victim of a witch’s spell one leg pointed
left, the other pointed right pulling her opposite
ways. Her life was a circle, a gravitational pull
to wayward rotation. Men caught by her centrifugal
spin queued in rotation to see her flicker matchstick
shadows on the bedroom ceiling, flickering
like the wings of a bird in a locked room.
If I had my life to live over I’m not sure I would do anything differently. Life is a journey, a series of crossroads, roundabouts and T junctions without any signposts to guide the way. At each intersection we must make a choice. Our decisions are based on limited information. Emotions, intuition and experience colour our judgement and we choose what we think best at the time. We evaluate, we take a risk or not. Whatever path we take there will be highs, lows and plateaus but the journey will not necessarily be better, just different.
The truth is life is unknowable. Crystal balls and tea leaves will not help. Surrender to your journey wherever it will take you for it is uniquely yours, your own fascinating story. Enjoy the highs, learn from the lows, rest during the plateaus. There are no good or bad journeys, only what was meant to be.
“It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.”
―
If only Eve could don a straw hat and vanish to the Isle of Paros!
Instead, she was trapped in the Garden, weaving hard lines
of blood as the beginning people judged her pink lady tears.
Where was her power over water? Lilith dried out in the desert.
They shall possess her forever and dwell there
from generation to generation.
As the mushroom cloud rose over the maroon lagoon
Eve wondered if it was, in fact, a good time for a trip.
She was wearing her lucky pearls and the new horizon
walking boots, birthday gifts from the ferryman.
It is He who casts the lot for them,
And with His hands He marks off their shares of her.
Sad to see swine die but she was really more of a snake person.
So she turned her last page with the left hand
of darkness and prepared to recycle her perfect skin,
gala smooth and hoping for first prize. Ka-Ching!
“Friendship is delicate as a glass, once broken it can be fixed but there will always be cracks”.
Waqar Ahmed
