“To perceive is to suffer.” – Aristotle

I wrote the poem below for a dear, suffering friend whom I could tell was starting to isolate in the wake of personal tragedy. I so often have done the same in my life when overwhelmed with pain and difficulties and the seeing of just too much–alongside believing I was alone in that seeing. The final declaration of the poem is one of sadness at the reality that those of us who could truly comfort each other in this space of perceiving so often are simultaneously, similarly battered & self-isolating, and so we are all very often unnecessarily and therefore tragically left alone in it. It is both a resigned sorrow at what is, and a challenge to look up and out from our self-imposed but understandable isolation and find the other perceivers, therefore giving life to the comfort we all need.

Storm-battered, similar sands,

Soaked

With an ocean as wide as horizon

As deep as sky—

heated, dried, swallowed, pulsated, relinquished

As a thousand fragments of earth and stone,

Swept up in swirling wind,

released without warning,

shattered on shore,

Like a dance of disorder,

As in a womb for the wild,

As in a paradox prison:

in this vastness,

this freeing of space,

this seeing

without relief,

where perfect clarity blurs

—blue on blue on darkened blue.

There are others

—we sense, we think we see—

in the scattered distance;

There are others (we think)

who squint through the starkness,

who lift momentarily in the lilting breeze,

who understand the nothingness

of endless everything,

who see too much to see at all

with sun-burnt eyes,

with eyes not made for opening

so wide.

But we are all islands.

Xx, Kay






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