Yay! Day seven of my Poem-A-Day-For-A-Week-Or-So project. I’m jolly impressed I got this far, although I say so myself. And I’m quite pleased with this one. Although, like all the others, it’ll benefit from some work on it later.

We Do Violence

We all occupy two places simultaneously:

Wherever we happen to be in the physical world,

And wherever we currently inhabit in our heads.

The trick is to get the two to coincide.

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We interpret our landscape as we walk,

Inflicting our thoughts upon it, changing it,

Or at the very least changing our perceptions of it,

Rather than being truly open to the experience.

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To achieve that, like a meditation

We need to let go of our thoughts.

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And the worst of these interpretations,

Is this absurd need to name everything.

We begin to only look for particular things.

And filter out those we cannot name.

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We do violence to the landscape in this way,

Subverting it from what it is, to what we wish it to be.

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We need to listen to the landscape in silence,

undistracted by thoughts or by words.

Words are, at best, a poor substitute for things.

As soon as we name a thing, we claim it as our own.

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We limit it to our own understanding, and we dilute it,

By placing it in the company of other things

That we name the same. It is akin to taking away the

Individual names of people and referring to them all as person.