All The Pain It Did Not Choose Poem by Seamus O' Brian
All The Pain It Did Not Choose
the hollowness of silence
leaning a planetary weight
against the lightless cavity
of a heart's entrenched abode.
Carried about in this tissued
sarcophagus, shackled in darkness
enslaved to its sleepless toil,
laboring without rest, without pause
across the weave of seasons
and the knotting of decades
stretching this tapestry from
the antecedent blackness of
its master's own awareness,
to the dark edge of eternity,
never a gleam of beauty
to fall upon it, never the kiss
of rain or breath of autumn's frost,
never the brush of lover's fervor,
but only ever chained
to the will of a mind
whose choices bring upon it
every plunge of sickening fear,
every arrow shaft of love-sick
glaciered oblivion, every piercing
thrust of agonizing shame;
such tremble through a heart
which bears in quivering silence
the sum of all pain
found in paths
it had no will to choose.
Yet again you wear the heart on the sleeve, powerful images as it is all unravels as we read along. Another great piece. Annette
I've often contemplated free-will and control. I think it was stirred by discovering that the mind creates a thought or an action before it arrives into your consciousness. I hope we are not the robotic products of an unseen entity which operates our being. I take it that this is the nub of your poem which is quite magnificent. Some of your phrases are quite startling such as the weave of seasons and glaciered oblivion. Oddly enough the latter reminded me of a novel I read in French about mountaineering in the Dru mountains of Eastern France. The climbers came across the body of a young climber embedded in a glacier. Perfectly preserved, he had been moving down for more than twenty years. I never forgot that image and your phrase brought it back to mind. It's a very fine poem and joins my favourites.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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5/3/2024 7:38:34 PM # 1.0.0.1119
as i have before, neal, i like your dense, unique, and accessible descriptions of things universal- in this case the heart. for another look at it, you may like my poem the heart as tabernacle if you haven't seen it already. -glen