Quote & poem 16/3/2018

'No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.' Virginia Woolf

For Ursula

I want to tell you something true Because that’s what she did. I want to take you down a road she built, only I don’t want to follow it to the end. I want to step off the edge and go into the underbrush Clearing another way, because that’s also what she taught Not how to repave her road but how to lay another Even if it meant the grass came through the cracks of the pavement, and the thicket ate it up.

I want to show you something that I dug up out of the earth inside Because she spent her life picking away at the tunnel veins And in the next one over, through the walls I heard her working, The rhythmic steady tick-tick-tick of her knocking at the stone, a music of the sharp end Of a pen digging into paper And tried to learn a rhythm of my own, how to get the weight swinging.

I want to take your hand and put it on the breathing monster’s side In the dark room, where we can’t see what we’re touching We only feel it’s in here with us, too vast to touch all at once. Here, it’s rough and scaly, and here, it’s smooth and hard as bone And it’s turning even as we try to make it out. But she did her best to tell us of every part that she could reach Calling back sometimes from the far side, muffled by its bulk And sometimes she put our hands on a tooth’s serrated edge But never without kindness The teeth were there anyway, and she wanted us to know where we kept cutting ourselves She never told the lie that the teeth were the only part that mattered.

But I’ll do all that tomorrow. Today I’ll pack some tools, a wide-bladed knife and rake Nothing with a motor, it’s work I want to do by hand And I’ll wave to you, going the same way Maybe we’ll see someone wandering, and call them over to come walk with us As far as the road goes.

Together we’ll rake up the leaves and cut the grass And pull back thornbush branches, even if we’ve forgotten our gloves And in the morning we’ll say goodbye and go our ways again Maybe you and I will walk together towards that high hill we caught a glimpse of, a few turns back We thought maybe the road would go there, but it never did So let’s go and try to find it And if we can’t quite get there, at least leave another marker on the way.

NAOMI NOVIK