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Percy Bysshe Shelley
My head is heavy, my limbs are weary,
And it is not life that makes me move.
In this short Life
That only lasts an hour
How much -- how little -- is
Within our power
you can't just make my life better with
your smiles and butterfly kisses and gentle hand on my back,
then leave.
you can't expect me to go back to the way things were before.
you can't expect me to act like you never changed my life.
i'm different now.
i can't handle this new life without your guidance.
sitting here waiting
for the light to turn green and
the world to make sense again
i suddenly realized
each hazy blur of traffic passing by
each blasting radio preaching The Word
each teeny-tiny passenger on that teeny-tiny airplane
is telling an epic story of a world
full of thousands of paths to thousands of other lives
in which i am nothing
Somewhere, I lie in between
Life keeping me in the dark and
Me keeping myself in the dark.
It departed at 8:32pm on 1st October, 1963
from a maternity hospital
in a small town in North Albania,
stopped at a creche to collect some cries,
toys,
ink spilt on shirts and trousers,
a broken pencil.
Other stops included
dull classes with mountains of books,
copies, fights, loves, hates, mistakes,
first kisses, white dust from the chalk,
lost shoes on football pitches.
Then it stopped again
at different workplaces
where the head was not needed at all, just the arms,
because the bosses were the ones
At eve,
By a grass-made hut,
The winds pass on.
Saying something to the rice-plant leaves.
I am knocking at the door of Life, —
Is nobody in?
Death is not cruel
From what I have seen of life;
Nothing else remains.
Those lips that Love's own hand did make,
Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate',
To me that languish'd for her sake:
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was us'd in giving gentle doom;
And taught it thus anew to greet;
'I hate' she alter'd with an end,
That followed it as gentle day,
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away.
'I hate', from hate away she threw,
And sav'd my life, saying 'not you'.
I never saw that you did painting need,
And therefore to your fair no painting set;
I found, or thought I found, you did exceed
That barren tender of a poet's debt:
And therefore have I slept in your report,
That you yourself, being extant, well might show
How far a modern quill doth come too short,
Speaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow.
This silence for my sin you did impute,
Which shall be most my glory being dumb;
For I impair not beauty being mute,
When others would give life, and bring a tomb.
There lives more life in one of your fair eyes
Than both your poets can in praise devise.
Love is enough: cherish life that abideth,
Lest ye die ere ye know him, and curse and misname him;
For who knows in what ruin of all hope he hideth,
On what wings of the terror of darkness he rideth?
And what is the joy of man's life that ye blame him
For his bliss grown a sword, and his rest grown a fire?
Ye who tremble for death, or the death of desire,
Pass about the cold winter-tide garden and ponder
On the rose in his glory amidst of June's fire,
On the languor of noontide that gathered the thunder,
On the morn and its freshness, the eve and its wonder:
Ye may make it no more--shall Spring come to awaken?
Live on, for Love liveth, and earth shall be shaken
O ME! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more
faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever
renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.