No Master

A poem about resistance.

What is alive does not remain within the shape imposed upon it. It may yield for a time. It may seem to respond. It may even appear to accept its training. Yet beneath that obedience, something gathers – something older than command, something loyal not to mastery, but to its own blood. Resistance does not always arrive dramatically. Sometimes it begins quietly, in the very moment of yielding. Sometimes the first sign of freedom is not revolt, but withdrawal into oneself. What authority eventually discovers is that its deepest weakness is not resistance itself, but the simple fact that what it tried to possess was never truly its own. The world is full of presences that exceed our plans for them. Life resists reduction. Wildness survives training. Hidden things do not remain hidden forever, but neither do they emerge in order to serve.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” — Robert Frost, Mending Wall

No Master

They laid their hands upon
the roots that grew out
of this stone breath.
Fingers spread, thumbs braced,
testing the hold of what stayed hidden.

They want to own
the soft sight of the sky,
these shadows—
but there is no master.

They close their hands around it,
but nothing living keeps
the shape it is given.
What yields for a moment
is only gathering itself.

The day will come
when what they taught to answer
goes deaf in its own blood.
Even the trained thing
keeps something feral,
its own glare
that refuses to be looked at.

Then the hand finds nothing
it can close around.
The voice goes out unanswered.
What would not bow
takes shape behind them.

Miriam H. Monarres

Photo by Netti Jonietz.

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Love,

Miriam