Missed Time

[osprey_archer]

Missed Time
by Ha Jin

My notebook has remained blank for months
thanks to the light you shower
around me. I have no use
for my pen, which lies
languorously without grief.

Nothing is better than to live
a storyless life that needs
no writing for meaning—
when I am gone, let others say
they lost a happy man,
though no one can tell how happy I was.

***

Doubtless this is not true for everyone - but I do find it so much easier to write when I am anxious about something else in my life.

Comments

[ghosted.livejournal.com]

I hardly ever write unless there's something I desperately need to say cryptically or lyrically. I'm sure someone would be proud. Maybe Wordsworth.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Byron, maybe? He seems totally into cryptic lyricality. Oooh, or maybe some of the modernists? I could totally see T. S. Eliot getting behind cryptic yet lyric messages. "Do I dare to eat a peach?"