Today's PAD Challenge prompt: "Time for our fourth (but not final) Two for Tuesday of the month! Pick one prompt or use both…your choice! [1] Write a free poem. [2] Write a not free poem."
Late at night, a very hastily written attempt at something I am interested in getting at (and that came up in a discussion at the end of the "Animalia Poetica" session at the NAR conference, the wordlessness of our love for pets). Earlier today I looked up the Kundera commentary, worth reading more fully, to remember it more precisely. Kundera's insight into animal-human relationship in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and his portrait of human love for pets have remained with me for many years as the most moving and insightful words I've read on the subject, and contribute to my love for this novel.
The Idyll
No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. . . . life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Among my cats I return;
free from language
from politics
from time itself, its terrible linearity.
Each day I tell each cat
it is the most beautiful one;
in paradise that is possible.
Each day their fur glows with approbation.
Their purring is the hum of perfect earth.
The white fur of their bellies,
turned up to the sun, is the milk,
the manna, the honey.
I bury my face to drink from it.
Bound to the world,
men mock what they long for:
such a life of bliss,
of love that never tires.
Again and again give me this moment,
as history shatters beyond the gate,
this eternal, the soft weight of it,
the paw flex, the slow blink.
--Draft by Anne Myles. Please do not copy, cite, or quote without permission.
Oh, yes.
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