Nothingness Poem by Linda Marie Van Tassell

"Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home? "

~ Emil M. Cioran


I remember being a little girl
in a big old house on an old brick street.
Stained glass sunlight was like enchanted fire
spreading across the floor to touch my feet.

I felt so small in echoes of the past.
The Victorian was settled with dust;
and rooms held secrets for children to find,
while the garden gate was flaking with rust.

The rooms were immense with windows too tall,
so many rooms in which sisters could play;
but it was too much and we grew apart.
We could not polish what always would stay.

I stood alone with my toes in the dirt
in a sea of green where grasses grew tall
and sipped its sweetness, wanting more of it,
needing the harvest of nothingness - all.

No hands farmed the land nor seeded the soil.
It was a gathering of earth and sky
that gathered in me the resolve to be
as blossoms of dew in the moon's pale eye.

I wrapped myself in the blanket of night.
I closed my eyes to immerse in the sound
inhaling the damp of nothing and none
feeling as one with the sky and the ground.

I wonder at how this paper could be
a sacred psalm in the palm of my hand
when words do not rise like crows to the sky
or tides washing over the untouched sand.

I know it's in me, the creator to be,
to script a something for others to gain,
like warmth from a fire, relief from a breeze,
or quenched petals of a rose in the rain.

A zither is plucked in back of my mind,
a spell is cast in a candle-lit room;
and little girls play, forever to stay,
with their toes in the dirt about to bloom.