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A Raven’s Weight

 

Authored by
Gregg Glory, Gregg G Brown

LOW WATER
Let me be as low as low water, I pray.
Let me fall from myself like shattered glass ungathered.
Let me be humiliated totally, right now, while I live.

See those trapeze artists spinning flawlessly in air?
See their powdered hands that never miss the bar?
See them stick the landing, slender feet relentless as pegs?

They are passing like bleached sand through a narrow space
And into the grave…. Whatever I am is not whatever
I will become everlastingly in that last, lowly room.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION:
Emotional suffering gives us access to the real world in a way that ideas, and even love, cannot attain.

We turn death and generation into a fable of sacrifice. Plants are buried and honored in their going, the Crop King is executed, and from his everlastingly renewed body the spring stalks arise to be culled again. His death is willingly embraced by him, or by his stand-in chosen from among the farmers–and this freely chosen death is overcome, in the Christian story, by God’s intervention. Or the sacrifice is invested with meaning by the very act of undertaking the self-imposed burden of sacrifice. Perhaps by the pagan anti-wish-fulfillment of tragedy–their heroes marching off-stage with a chin-lifted “tragic gaiety.”