Nocturne

When exhausted, everything abrades.

Cars, the insistent beep-beeping of trains as they approach the station, train station announcements and the slowness of the woman ahead in the line.

Only the silence of a candle lit room and music are acceptable salves. No human voices, please.

***
Twitter is fast becoming a place for me to pick up links to fun reads.

Via dsng, Lucy Kellaway's column in the FT on exams - funny, thought provoking and true. Love when people introduce me to great reading material.

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Questions asked during camp:-

Auditory or visual? The sense of sight or the sense of hearing- which would you pick to give up, if you had to give up one of the two?

Touch or taste? Again, which would you give up?

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I chose to keep touch. Here's why.

Two Countries

Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers–silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.

–Naomi Shihab Nye

When first we faced, and touching showed

When first we faced, and touching showed
How well we knew the early moves,
Behind the moonlight and the frost,
The excitement and the gratitude,
There stood how much our meeting owed
To other meetings, other loves.

The decades of a different life
That opened past your inch-close eyes
Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
Nor could I hold you hard enough
To call my years of hunger-strife
Back for your mouth to colonise.

Admitted: and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change
The world back to itself--no cost,
No past, no people else at all--
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?

- Philip Larkin