Holding Darkness

[Bii]

*deleted*

[PrinceMyshkin]

Such a bleak poem! I should have warned you to stay away from that curry!

[chasestalling]

love the assonance: yi, lee, we, z

[symphony]

wow Bii :)

[motherhubbard]

Bii, you are really one of my favorites here.

[the silent x]

really good bii, what happened to inspire the poem though?

[Bii]

Thanks for all the kind comments.

Silent x - I have a friend who suffers with depression, and has done so off and on for a couple of years now. This week he's hit a real low and is worse than I ever seen him before. I'm very worried. It just takes over and he becomes a different person. I suppose this is an expression of both the depression and the affect it has on the people around him. The last stanza is my hope, that he can beat it and break this horrible cycle, or worse, that I could stop caring, and that maybe that's the only way I can break free?

[PrinceMyshkin]

Thanks for all the kind comments.

Silent x - I have a friend who suffers with depression, and has done so off and on for a couple of years now. This week he's hit a real low and is worse than I ever seen him before. I'm very worried. It just takes over and he becomes a different person. I suppose this is an expression of both the depression and the affect it has on the people around him. The last stanza is my hope, that he can beat it and break this horrible cycle, or worse, that I could stop caring, and that maybe that's the only way I can break free?

I understand, and empathize. I had a student, one of the best writers it was my pleasure to come into contact with and a thoroughly likeable guy, but it came to my attention that he suffered from occasional panic attacks and had discovered that the only way to arrest them was to mutilate himself. We kept in touch for a while and I believed that if any person had reason to know that I deeply loved him, J. did - but it was a terribly humbling lesson to me that there was a limit to what love (or at least my love) could do for another.

The love I have felt and do feel for my middle child seems to me to go beyond any I have felt for anybody. However, when he was 16 and I had raised the question of how he felt about our relationship, he said: "Well, Dad, sometimes your love is a burden on me."

I didn't ask him to elaborate because I had an immediate intuition of what he meant, that I loved him so much that he dared not injure himself, ever, in any way because of the pain it would cause me. Andhe had the right - as we all do - to live in such a way that he might risk injury or pain.

But I have sometimes thought of his words as some sort of bedrock statement of the unavoidably tragic nature of human existence.

[stephofthenight]

wow i realy like this, its deep.

It cries for me, its need
is endless, rooting
blindly open-mouthed with hunger.

It grows, it spreads exponentially,
and so exposes
the solitary crudeness of flesh.

i realy like these two stanzas thou, they scream pain, but silently whisper hope...steph

[Pendragon]

Darkness is a thing that inspires the human soul quite as much as light, and to express it as well as you have takes skill.

Pen

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