Ready
Standing motionless in the midst of infinity
– Hikmet
It’s a skinny horse he’s describing –
a crippled nag outside his cell window –
while he writes a letter to his wife.
I can see it in the stillness, too, in this
grey Connemara mare
whose head droops a little, simply being there
while her foal stares at me
over the hedge, the mother in that moment
being the centre of a world
without borders, in a second so dense
with mere being it throws time into meltdown
and I join the animal in it for a timeless minute
before coming to myself again and walking on
with a headful of Hikmet in prison
who’s telling his wife how he faces into silence
by singing in the thin piping voice of my childhood,
and how in Spring
he’s led out to sunshine for the first time
and stands, animal-like, motionless in wonder,
and stays emptied out like that and happy,
his back against the wall,
like the birds I’ve seen
standing stilled for minutes at a time
in the shelter of a hedge
and staring out without moving a feather,
eyes full of nothing but emptiness, entranced
in every sense, it seems,
by the feel of just being there, the sense
of being anything at all, or nothing,
with no fixed abode but the body – like a sail,
says Hikmet, ready for the journey.
Page(s) 21
magazine list
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