Today
you are to explore the theme, Rift
to be found in society, in relationships, in individual experiences or in
Nature.
As August is a monsoon month in India we have braced ourselves for ensuing disasters; like cloudbursts, landslides in the Himalayas, floods elsewhere. There will be stories of splits, breaches, flaws, miscommunications everywhere. Every disaster leaves a trail of sad tales of humanity in its wake. Sigh.
One is appalled at the discriminatory practices on specific grounds like age, disability, gender, race, religion and even national origin! This sense of brokenness is so strong that life seems to have lost its moorings. One doesn’t even know when a small word of little significance will have a devastating consequence of emotional chasm. Will there be a yearning for reconciliation? I wonder.
Then there are big things like wars and political upheavals. In our lifetime we had seen The Soviet Union fragmenting into smaller nations while the East and West Germany merging into one whole.
Sometimes letting go is needed and ‘rift’ is embraced with vigor. It’s a refusal to be broken by adversity. Rift is not all about breaking up but also about new formations: like the river, meandering away with its outer bank eroding while the inner bank gets built up.
A
couple of poems here:
We Wear the Mask
Paul
Laurence Dunbar
We
wear the mask that grins and lies,
It
hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This
debt we pay to human guile;
With
torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And
mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why
should the world be over-wise,
In
counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay,
let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We
smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To
thee from tortured souls arise.
We
sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath
our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
There Will Come Soft Rains
Sara
Teasdale
(War
Time)
There will
come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in
the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will
wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one
will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would
mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring
herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
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