You draw a breath as you dive under the wave
Of silence in this nether world
Where peace and pain and green light and bubbles flow
As your body curves slowly to the surface
like it was the first time
Waking from a dream that wants to drown you
in its comforting
Pinpricks of light as you pause between the forces
Of darkness and light, hope and despair, death and life
Like an abandoned photograph slowly fading
Wishing everything would dissolve forever
and you would cease to be
alone
* Jeremy Dyer is an acclaimed Cape Town artist.
A multilayered poem, an existentialist poem, one needs to 'dive' into it to appreciate it.
ReplyDeleteThe paradox, perhaps: You can be alone, but not lonely; or lonely, but not alone.
ReplyDeleteYes. The poem reminds me of Tillich, about whom I am reading at the moment: 'Even in the despair about meaning being affirms itself
ReplyDeletethrough us. The act of accepting meaninglessness in itself is a
meaningful act. It is an act of faith.' Compare our poet above: 'Pinpricks of light as you pause between the forces of darkness and light'.
I do know the strange experience of going below the sea - not as a diver exactly, but for example when taken down by a large wave while swimming - they can pick you up and take uyouu perhaps four meters down easily enough and indeed "your body curves slowly to the surface like it was the first time"...
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say I felt like an abandoned photograph, but certiany there is this sense of being between two worlds - because you are, between the everyday land world to which you belong, and the submarine world in which you are only a brief visitor...