November 3, 2009
The Practicality of Relativity
I see ancient symbols scratched in the rocks,
which are scoured by rain and split by ice,
but the connection to these ancestors
has been all but erased by human deed
much more quickly than the elements.
They proudly controlled their little kingdom,
now overrun with white rats and barbed wire fences.
Expiring rich OAPS and ephemeral tourists
now squat on your land.
Land robbed of its lifeblood.
Those people, my people,
evicted and our culture extirpated.
I stand on the soil that brought me to life
and I still feel your blood under my feet.
I never got to say goodbye to you.
And like the photographs
the colour of you has faded in my mind
and your face is all but a blur
that I can decipher with a mirror.
You are bleaching out and fading to white.
But you remain a visceral energy in my heart,
firing in my thoughts and rushing in my blood.
I meet you behind bulletproof glass,
a separation designed to keep you safe and me at bay,
and as close as we are I am no one to you, not even a person.
I meet another behind the same glass,
put there as a punishment,
as a measure to keep them within,
and despite the partition
we are still connected by some force that penetrates it;
emotive photons, perhaps.
I sit down beside you.
You are degrading.
You no longer recognise me.
You think I’m your husband
and the bombs are still burning people alive on the horizon.
I can’t go on any longer,
because you are only alive in the physical sense.
So for my own sanity,
I have to pull the plug on you
before they hang up the sign saying ‘no resuscitation’.
But the you that has gone, is still lingering on in me,
and through new generations.
And though there are so many physical miles between us,
it seems a shorter distance to the anonymous people I pass every day.
I feel you close to me, penetrating deep inside of me.
Even though I have learned that nothing’s forever and the meaning of pain;
all of these relative separations just reinforce how valuable this is.
