(1)
Once, I did not have memories.
Long before words, before sin,
before hopes and dreams.
There was no God then.
Just a feeling so intense
it must have meant alive.
(2)
I do not remember
how it felt to be born.
I do not remember anything
before the need to christen –
to put letters to the way I
felt and the things I believed.
To give the numinous feeling
I had lost the name
of God,
a word without a memory.
(3)
In the home where my grandfather lives,
I observe the way he stares at my brother and me
with a desperate yearning to run and dance and play with us
like a child again, to feel intensely the things
we do now. Trapped in a single room, he wishes
to forget what it means to be lonely, to return to
the state of ecstasy before memories, before words,
before sin and hopes and dreams. There was no God then,
and there is no God now. Just an emptiness where, once, there was
(4) yù yī (noun):
a feeling so intense
it must have meant alive.
Once, I did not have memories.
Long before words, before sin,
before hopes and dreams.
There was no God then.
Just a feeling so intense
it must have meant alive.
(2)
I do not remember
how it felt to be born.
I do not remember anything
before the need to christen –
to put letters to the way I
felt and the things I believed.
To give the numinous feeling
I had lost the name
of God,
a word without a memory.
(3)
In the home where my grandfather lives,
I observe the way he stares at my brother and me
with a desperate yearning to run and dance and play with us
like a child again, to feel intensely the things
we do now. Trapped in a single room, he wishes
to forget what it means to be lonely, to return to
the state of ecstasy before memories, before words,
before sin and hopes and dreams. There was no God then,
and there is no God now. Just an emptiness where, once, there was
(4) yù yī (noun):
a feeling so intense
it must have meant alive.
