Sentir

A poem about human consciousness.

What if feeling and thought aren’t separate compartments, but part of the same living creature, driven by hunger, pulse, and attention? Language and history hover in the background as a reminder that people have long tried to name this braid of mind and heart. Therein is the tension between wonder and fear. The same awareness that allows intimacy with beauty also brings unease—an anxious self-consciousness, a dread of existing, and a trembling before one’s own potential. We must have courage. We must remain open to what we sense and what we know, even if that makes us vulnerable.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”-Rainer M. Rilke

Sentir

One must be brave
as the sunlight filters 
through leaves.

It sheds its thin, bright coins,
spending the same light
until the air is rich with gold,
until the air is alive with flicker,
as if the world is thinking out loud.

To feel and to think
are the same animal— 
One creature, one hunger,
one heart pumping hard
when the light draws nearer.

Since ancient times, 
language has known this,
it braided mind and heart
into a single rope
and called it human.

But this animal nervously
gnaws at its meat.
It dreads its very existence
and everything it could be.

Miriam H. Monarres

Photo by Pexels.

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