Nobody is coming to tell your story for you. That blunt claim sits at the heart of Dominique Cyprès's eight-line poem "Ourselves Alone." Its speaker is an unnamed "we" who explain, almost wearily, why they must narrate their own lives. Outsiders either "speculate manufacture" or "simply ignore us and hope / we go away in time." The poem's central idea is that self-narration does two jobs at once. It protests against being misrepresented or forgotten, and it carries memory past the end of a single lifetime, "so / they will not die / with us."
The first line has an oddity. As printed, it says "we tell our own stones," while the second stanza says "stories." This may be a slip, but the poem works either way. Read as written, stones are heavy, silent and lasting, like gravestones, markers or burdens carried. The verb "tell" also means "to count," so the speakers may be tallying their losses as well as narrating them. This is an inference, but a tempting one. Then "stories" arrives in the second stanza, nearly the same sound with an extra syllable, as if the mute stone has been given breath. If the first line is a misprint, the poem simply repeats itself, and the repetition still stresses the insistence of "our own."
The construction is as bare as the argument. There are no capital letters and no punctuation, so the lines sound like speech rather than a prepared statement. There is no regular metre and no end rhyme. Repetition does the work instead: "we tell our own" opens both stanzas, and "because" ends two lines in a row. That doubling builds a chain of reasons. We tell because no one else will, and no one else will because they would rather do something else. It sounds like someone who has explained this many times, patiently, to people who still haven't listened.
The word choices in the third line are sharp. "Speculate manufacture" has no comma between the verbs, so guessing slides straight into fabricating. Without punctuation, one almost becomes the other. Then comes the offhand "or simply ignore us," where "simply" makes dismissal sound easy and everyday. The break after "hope" leaves that word dangling, as though the hope were something faintly shameful. "In time" is double-edged. It can mean eventually, but it also suggests that these others are willing to wait. Their strategy is patience, and the speakers' fate is to be outlasted.
The second stanza is shorter and tighter, and the logic turns. "Because" looked backward to causes, but "so" looks forward to a purpose. The pronoun "they" also changes its referent. In the first stanza it means the others who speculate and ignore, while in the second it seems to mean the stories themselves, though that is a reading rather than something the poem states. The same small word moves from the people who erase to the things that must be saved. The faintest sound-link bridges the gap: "time" ends the first stanza and "die" sits in the second, sharing a long vowel. The wish that "we go away" and the fear that the stories will "die" become close neighbours.
The poem's imagery is thin on purpose. Apart from the stones, there are no landscapes, objects or named people, only the pressure of "we" against "they." The final words, "with us," give the group the last word, and the missing full stop means the sentence is not closed.
The title carries the poem's tension. "Ourselves Alone" can mean abandoned, with no one else to rely on. It can also mean self-reliant, doing the work without outside permission. The poem holds both meanings. It never says who "we" are, which lets readers apply it to any group that has been spoken about rather than listened to. Cyprès makes the case in under thirty words, and the brevity helps. A poem about being overlooked cannot afford to waste the attention it manages to get.