"Island of Yesterday"
Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
─John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I
It is the window of a prison they left him
And an island.
That fatal year, with frenzy and a goal
A goal that still reverberated in his vein during
Those sleepless nights,
He faced the impossible and the multitude.
Battlefield, blood, reeking breath, memory
Religion and philosophy all trapped.
In a heated discussion of life and death.
He was an Achilles, mighty and fearless
His men used to call him. Never, never
An Achilles who was
swollen with his feet.
His feet, well shaped by birth and dimmed in
The sobbing Styx, en-ti-re-ly. A Beowulf, he was
The epic and the sole man that
Pulled heaven and earth apart.
Or
He should be the great Ozymandias
King of kings.
And yet even Ozymandias cheated
No death and passed into obscurity.
They offered him nothing but
Scylla and Charybdis:
Meet the great Ozymandias in his
Ruin or become self-exiled Moses.
He knew the Holy Book better.
So he came down to this island
An island of his own. The days he cursed
Failing him to join the ghostly comrades.
(He would have better resisted solitude that way.)
The nights, he wished he had chosen to be
The decaying legends of bards, and talked
History with the mighty and the glorious.
Secluded
The dark cell embraced his full existence
As he kept
Sunken,
To its hellish deep.
A sealed window allowed
Great view from the cell but he never came
Close to it. A view to the open was
A view to the land he did not claim, the kingdom
He never built.
A view led not to the glory, whispering long
Deceased dreams, of yesterday.
He would not have come close to it.
Then it follows that one day a most
Unexpected guest comes to pass.
A sky-lark
That perches on the window.
They say the bird, a rare species, could
Not even show up in the mainland where
The spring echoes the sound of nature.
The bird has scarcely argued for its presence
Before it lets loose the melodies.
Yet he would not have listened to it.
For the sky-lark sings
Beauty that he let pass all
Too easily, in the years when he went to war, in the years
Before it, he would not have listened
To the tunes that seem to ridicule his
Island of one’s own.
So sings the sky-lark. The bird, they say
Never sings but when it does
The world stands still, for it could not be stopped till
Overpowered by death.
A death song celebrating life, even right in the
Burning of it.
Like the phoenix reborn from the ashes of fire.
Like the spring roses
Budding against the pain of winter
The sky-lark never sings but it cracks
Of life.
He listens.
And the window breaks.
--
For what is writing?
Writing is always about negotiating the real of life!
如果在冬夜，我，一個旅人
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