SOLITUDE AND LONELINESS

Solitude and loneliness refuse the sign of equality.

They cancel each other out like snow and rain.

Solitude is quieter; loneliness gnaws at the bones.

Solitude is resolute, willing, intentional.

It lifts you out of the crowd that suffocates you,

Like a storm-wave crashing down from height.

Solitude is a retreat from hysterical shouting,

From the daily lamentations we all know,

And from the media glossolalia, profane,

A dark banner twisting in the air,

So foreign to me, solitary as I am.

Solitude asks for wide spaces to breathe beneath the trees

That murmur in the wind, exhaling the oxygen you crave.

In solitude you drink the sparkling air and widen your sight,

Filling tired alveoli with cups of white molecules

That love the green canopies of branches

And the forest’s quiet piano instruments.

In solitude you may become a brother to birds,

Clever as Saint Francis of Assisi.

And you may hear the crying child within yourself,

The call of grass in need, sky-travellers moving through time,

Chaste distant worlds and their poems,

Planets where odes of joy grow like water lilies

Beside silver lakes whose waters your feet enter,

Walking carefree, free-spirited, barefoot — and leaping.

But loneliness is when you sit by the window,

Watching the path as dawn breaks,

And in the dusk, like Yesenin’s mother,

You wait for footsteps from the shadows that will not come.

You write longing with your breath in helplessness

For the person who long ago forgot you,

Or never cared for you at all. Loneliness tightens the throat;

it is the inhale of a lung-sick patient,

A lack of air, a smoker’s cough, a futile cry.

I walk with solitude hand in hand,

Avoiding noise and uproar,

And I skip over loneliness as over a rope.

In it I shed my tears; in it I can only weep without consolation.