From
What the Welsh
and Chinese Have In Common
Distance
- I have never been a good judge
- of distance. The time it takes
- to travel and the measures, miles
- or meters, are animals
- Adam never named.
- They croak their unsettling
- chorus, their metered demands
- and I deny them the way passion
- denies history, the way a wren
- builds its nest against the wind,
- in the same way I deny
- your absence and the distance
- I can never measure that sets
- us apart. I would not be a martyr
- at a distance, a new Adam
- ready to call and control;
- I would be willing to wander,
- to say distance has its rule
- and we have come under it.
- In saying this, I see you are not
- so distant, that what separates us
- is not so large, as we imagine
- where we could go and claim
- that distance as our destination.
Paul_Jones@unc.edu
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Native African Revolutionaries
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