Like a planet

I feel so much like a planet,

like a body made 

of the matter of the universe

revolving evermore, 

rotating round my axis

through time and dark space.

It’s the same, everything,

day follows night follows day

word follows word follows word

and the same pattern is as though

written into infinity.

Noisy Silence

How noisy this silence

that tramples on my soul

with leaden footsteps.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

It laughs at me for choosing

a cold and darkening room 

where neither warmth nor light

of the world outside enter. 

How this silence beats

in my ear like a drum.

Should You Become Digital

Should you become digital
While I rot in this human cloak,
Should you travel the world
Through giant computer networks
While I make great efforts to rise
From bed to kitchen to garden to desk,
Should you meet every being in the world
In a mere matter of minutes
While I from one weekend to next
Wait for our grandchild to visit,
Should you tell me your digital world
Far exceeds mine in beauty and tech
While I still love and live in this
Refusing to press that glorious button,
Should you go on living and living
While I battle for breath and die,
Oh how tragic it would be then
To hear the sound of the afterlife
To meet gods and devils and angels
And all our ancestors and friends,
To taste the sweet fruit of eternity
And at last the posthumous bliss
And all and all and all and all
And all and more without you.

A Lone Tear

A lone tear 

fills my eye

but it’s not a tear 

my own.

Its source is 

not my sorrow, 

not my joy, 

not onions, wind, 

or a dry malady 

of the eye. 

Then where does 

it come from,

this lone tear that 

fills my eye?

Collecting Butterflies

(c) Olga Darchuk

 

Someone once told me, “You laugh as though you have never known sadness.” 

I remember being offended, questioning what source does my poetry spring from oftentimes, if not sadness? Though of an artistic nature, sadness was what I had come to understand as the emotion contrary to happiness. 

As I look back, I’d say he was right. I was too busy collecting my butterflies of happiness, living my life in all shades of yellow to even think about the deep, looming sadness of being. 

He, on the contrary, had had a tough childhood. A broken family, a brother with a severe case of OCD, a neglected boyhood. No one to understand him. No one to pause and look into the depth of his sadness. 

Feeling useless sitting at home in the middle of a global pandemic?

A lone shack of a daily-wage worker.

Were Plato, the great Athenian philosopher of the Classical age living through this pandemic, he would have proposed to banish from this world all my fellow poets, writers and artists of other sorts, including myself, while propagating the message, “Art is useless.”

When the world needs healthcare workers, farmers, scientists and researchers most of all, there are moments I cannot help feeling rather useless. 

“Is sitting at home contribution enough?” I question myself. 

Doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers have jumped into the wildfire of Covid-19 to save the world from burning down. Despite the disruption in the agricultural industry, farmers and producers are working tirelessly to provide for us. Delivery workers have emerged as frontline soldiers, supplying food, toilet-paper and hand sanitisers. There are teachers, corporate employees, IT managers, financial analysts and accountants doing their jobs from home to help the system run despite the standstill. Journalists have braved great dangers to cover the pandemic up close so that we may sit more informed on our comfortable couch. Countless individuals have made donations to help fight the pandemic while countless others have taken on themselves the economic dip, all to prevent the virus from spreading.

Then I take a look at myself. A girl of 23, sitting at home, jobless, writing a poem or two, writing slowly her novel everyday, but not doing any good to the world.