the tears  of charlie

his life unheard, now shared                              
for ears perked open to hear his tales
his truth gathered in his breast years long:
these now tease words from his trusting lips
lips that had long awaited someone
to enter the garden of his heart
roam therein, lay upon the lea
picnic beneath his bleeding tree

charlie's tears leaked quietly
strong as joyous drops
assured that he was heard
'neath once buried words
and in his friend-padded embrace
of the revelations of his heart
he was set free to be
the the story-teller of his life



*...the only remedy against the loss of orientation is to create anew one's own North, East, West and South and posit in that new space a Witebsk or a Dublin elevated to the second power.  What has been lost is recuperated on a higher level of vividness and presence.
-Czeslaw Milosz


*Exile is a test of internal freedom and that freedom is terrifying.  Everything depends upon our own resources, of which we are mostly unaware and yet we make decisions assuming our strength will be sufficient.  The risk is total, not assuaged by the warmth of a collectivity where the second rate is usually tolerated, regarded as useful and even honored.  Now to win appears in a crude light, for we are alone and loneliness is a permanent affliction of exile.  Once Friedrich Nietzsche exalted the freedom of height, of loneliness, of the desert.  Freedom of exile is of that lofty sort, though it is imposed by circumstances and,therefore, deprived of bathos.  A brief formula may encapsule the outcome of that struggle with our own weakness: exile destroys, but if it fails to destroy you, it makes you stronger.
-Czeslaw Milosz