Here is a poem that came through today as I endlessly (and joyfully) toil on the renovations and creation of our new studio…
So close are the sounds of crying and laughing
That, when heard from the other side of wall (through paint, plaster, wood, and time),
The subtleties that distinguish their place
Are lost.
And like our brains,
Our stomachs bear the same sounds/signals for hunger and for pain
The gurgling of need
The pitch of want
The pain of too much, the ache of not enough.
The best poems are the ones that can never be written down.
Lost before they can be claimed.
Pen, paper, hand, computer, too strong for them. Too material.
Too rough.
And the unseen wall of forbidden
(that is made of nothing but, perhaps, the married polarities of shame and pride)
rising when the one who cries
Pretends, to the stranger,
that reddened cheeks are not from tears but from…
running
from laughing…
from allergies….
From blush,
So that everything can stay hush, hush.
In the space that will become our studio, as I strip away the shag carpeting, foam, and layer upon layer of wallpaper,
To return to a bear room below
To plain wood and white wall,
I wonder what it was that was being sought in all of those layers.
What was being hidden
What was being told
What was being lost
And what remains once revealed.
Indentures of wall, of story, of skin, of time, of stomach, of mind.
Of dream nailed in under weathered board
By hands and hammer
Long past, buried and unknown.
By Moksha Sommer (May 21, 2014)