There’s a forest that stands at the exact center of sorrow.
Regrets find no shelter there.
The trees, when they sway,
sway like the manes of horses when a storm’s not far.
There’s no reason to stay there,
nothing worth going to see,
but if you want to you can pass through the forest
in the better part of a long day.
Who would want to, though?
To have entered the forest changes nothing about sorrow.
It’s a forest. Not oblivion. Not erasure.
Some have entered it in the name of distraction,
if only briefly, from the sorrow within which
the forest thrives to no apparent purpose—fools, dreamers,
the desperate from whom it’s best, if at all possible,
to look calmly away, the trees of the forest at the center of sorrow—
the exact center—all but say,
or that’s what it sounds like on windier nights,
tonight, for example. At the forest’s exact center,
almost impossible to find, but I have been there myself,
there’s a makeshift grave, more than likely overgrown by now
with weeds, moss, the usual.
With defeat, desire, the usual.
Wingless ambition, frangible hope, misunderstanding, i.e., mistake,
another form of weakness, i.e., the usual.
That the forest itself contains no apology
doesn’t mean you’re not hurt. Or I’m not sorry. Or I didn’t hurt you.
Daily Dose of Poetry 