To climb atop the promontory
she had bled while building (for) herself,
appeared like the death of ambition,
in the perfectly glowing hands
she beheld in the blur of morn vision.
To have always known it as illusion
felt nothing like knowing it at last;
and learning it never existed –
even as an illusion she once endeared –
was the reason she resisted.
Her resistance was not an illusion.
It was the stingiest thorn
shamed into residing in her throat
where it lay without sheath,
nicking, pricking, stabbing
against every attempt to breathe.
Her dream had been far more truthful –
Not the one wherein she ascended,
But the one wherein she was lost:
Though also the one in which she found
the one she wished to climb for,
A stranger to her ambitious mount.
‘He is on his way home, to me!’
She had devotedly chanted the rote,
And though it had ceased to be a dream –
(Where was he now?) ‘Hush!’ Hush!’ –
Unaffected, as if (still) in a dream
she went on ironing the seam.
That he was removed from the present
seemed to her like a mystery solved,
for present always gives way to future.
Just then the thorn pricked once again
to push his having never been present
down her voiceless throat in pain.
And yet the question of a future
in which they shared the illusion,
permeated the quiet breaking of dreams,
like a future one can imagine, admire
but never claim as one’s own.
Artwork by: Samuele Errico Piccarini on Unsplash
