I came across this poem for the first time tonight, and thought of the work we are doing on Lokasparsa's new piece. As we step into the sensation of loss, I find myself frequently confused by what seem to be the "wrong" feelings: freedom in disaster; oppression in finding; pleasure in yearning; emptiness in requitement.
So many layers in the world...
"From A Survivor"
by Adrienne Rich
The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days
I don't know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race
Lucky or unlucky, we didn't know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them
Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special
Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more
since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could and could not do
it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life
Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making
which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements
each one making possible the next.
--Jennifer
Dancer, Lokasparsa