- Non-Erotic Poetry
- I never
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I never wrote until I knew
how still things were without my voice.
How many things weren’t being said.
How many things weren’t being seen.
I was silence in an unfilled space,
that light without which darkness sees.
I never missed you till I didn’t look,
and there you weren’t
setting silence free.
- COMMENTS
Anonymousover 10 years agoSuch a quiet poem. Still I hear echoes of your erotic stories between the lines, between the words.
gem28over 15 years agoso few words,expressing deep thoughts. as usual from you doctor,your give me something to ponder on.again thank you.
KOLKOREover 16 years agoHere is a poem in which the narrator wishes he could have undone all that he speaks about and at the same time is aware of the futility of this wish. By changing and acting, any act, something positive is done -even the act of the negation itself. When memories are painful we do our best to hide it -first and foremost from ourselves. What is so enticing in this poem is that with the simple tool of double negative, the raw pained message becomes obscure, exactly as a pained heart needs it to be. <P>
The strongest example to this veiling technique is IMO in the last stanza: “I never missed you till I didn’t look/ and there you weren’t” which could be ‘translated’ to (more or less): 'when I did not look, you were gone – only then I missed you'. Painfully clear, but who needs that much pain? As I mentioned in other occasions the efforts to remove or deny the pain are usually (at least for me) the most touching of any direct statement. <P>
But thematically, the act of writing as compensation and eulogizing for a loss comes right at the beginning and it culminates in the third stanza: "I was silence in an unfilled space / the light without which darkness sees" Only in silence can one find direction in the dark; becoming aware of any other sound to be directed by. Still, the act of ‘speaking’ now, negates that past silence and yields the narrator blind to that past unique seeing. It is parallel to the last stanza where another act which breaks away from the previous status quo proves to carry grim consequences. The loved one, unlike the narrator has not stepped up with him. She has not set the silence free there fore she is still silent – and in the internal universe of this poem worlds away from him
Anonymousover 16 years agoA very complex poem (as if you didn't know). It kind of morphs from one thing and becomes another. I find myself wondering who set silence free, who brought you out of that box when you began to write. Leighlilly
LeBrozalmost 17 years agoThis poem was mentioned in the Archival Review thread, in a picking through Lit's archive of over 36,000 poems.
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