Litera scripta manet, so we're told
but words written on the flesh
must move when the body moves;
words written on the heart
must beat.
The scrape of metal on stone fades
into silence. I almost think I will
set myself to unwrite every word –
my tongue at the corner of my mouth,
my pen filled with white ink; that I will carefully
trace every line you wrote,
until the words gleam only like
old scars, caught by a chance
change in light: weals of meaning
to be traced by a lover's hand.
4 comments:
'Here lies one whose name was writ in water' is one of my favoured gravestone lines so the poem speaks to me, Dale! I very much like the notion of unwriting every word with a 'pen filled with white ink'.
Thanks, Dick!
We write our lives, then we unwrite them. Construct the destruct. I like this very much.
Thank you, Zhoen!
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