It seemed that there might be moon and stars to see tonight, but as dusk neared the clouds restored themselves, and now no light penetrates them. There might be more rain before morning, but right now there is only the sound of gathered drops dripping from the trees. Tonight it seems a melancholy sound, but the melancholy is not created by the dripping. I've brought it from somewhere in the back of my mind, and it doesn't want to be dispelled. I try to recall similar nights when my mood was lighter, but no such image will reveal itself. I wonder where thoughts are hiding when I can't bring them forth? My mind must be larger than I imagine, and full of displaced moments.
But there will be sunlight tomorrow, and tonight will be driven away, sent to lurk somewhere until it will perhaps return someday, unbidden. The more past there is, the stranger and more ungovernable it becomes, like cards being turned over, the familiar form of each more and more a surprise.
Sunday Verse
Happiness Is The Art of Being Broken
by Bruce Dawe
Happiness is the art of being broken
With least sound. The old, whom circumstance
Has ground smooth as green bottle-glass
On the sea's furious grindstone, very often
Practice it to perfection. (For them, death
Is the one definitive shrug
In an infinite series, all prior gestures
Take relevance from this, as much express
Sorrow for stiff canary or cold son.)
Always the first fragmentation
Stirs us to fear… Beyond that point
We learn where we belong, in what uncaring
Complex depths we roll, lashed by light,
Tumbling in anemone-dazzled fathoms
Seek innocence in surrender,
Senility an ironic act of charity
Easing the agony of disparateness until
That day when, all identity lost, we serve
As curios for children roaming beaches,
Makeshift monocles through which they view
The same green transitory world we also knew.
