Guest blog

All that life

 

All that life

1. All that life: from first rank beginnings in the earth,
something stirred in matter; there emerged a drive
to animate the dirt - Surprise! - a brief ellipse called
life         the breath         arrived, then came the certain slide

back to sludge. A trick, endlessly repeated. Generations rise,
act, expire. The mud is packed with death. Again, the new
recurs: hopeful twigs root the sky, quick fish swarm beneath
swirls of birds migrating to merge with landscape. None

can escape the loop. Sprigs and wriggling nematodes
lift inspired shapes to glance above the mulch derived
from those who went before         then die         Layers of
life rest limp and crushed beneath the holy stone of time,

hidden from the spinning crazy round of sun and moon,
and left fermenting inside the warm barrel of the earth.

2. All that pain: the bloody, hacked-off limbs of war; those injuries
a lover’s heart sustains. Lives stocked with hardened grudge
or slow-cooked revenge. The bludgeon of recurrent thought,
or fuzz of the drug-smudged brain. The push towards

those things we love, and would not lose: an early lily, lush
in bloom; brass ensembles filling sun-bronzed rooms; a child
immersed, creating nests away from harm in long bush grass.
All this richness soon will pass, be lost, is already past, has gone.

The screw rotates again; with each turn the living thread goes
underground. All vital cells, all life’s vast loveliness, and all vile
anguish, is delivered back to silence, to rot, to fertilize the next
round of intrepid roots and sprouts, fiery heart- and limb-buds.

Sometimes, the aftermath of life sinks deeper still; lakes of slow
decay compose         thick cud of sleep         and the dark prayer of oil.

 

How Life Is

In the savoury air of the curry joint we sit
and eat - two women divorced from husbands
and lost lives. It might be the vindaloo,
or the wine, but I am crying, snot-nose,
in full view of those who wish to enjoy
their food. I’m trying to explain to you, or
to myself: how life is unmoved by who is right
or wrong, and who did what to whom; we are
mere players in a great pantomime,
performing parts which must stay true
to narrative alone; right now, this might mean
weeping salt into a chilli stew at a table near the sea –

that other consistent, unfathomed story
repeating, repeating, in the dark, endlessly.

© Dawn Garisch

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