can’t be known except / in the words of its making,
Every day, a deep breath. A considered response. An eyebrow maintained at an appropriate level.
So many ways to be arch.
The same playbooks, the same responses, even as the stakes evolve.
Instead of how did we get here, perhaps why are we here, still. Why are we still, here.
The decreasingly polite fiction of we.
Whatever we are doing is what we are doing, what we would have been doing. What we did and what we are failing to do.
Attribution
A voice from the dark called out,
‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
— from Making Peace by Denise Levertov