Photo by Krzysztof Niewolny
Ripple
When the flight of a butterfly is the only thing that breaks the silence and then you realize that its flight is silent too and you begin to wonder if you actually exist anymore and so you decide to write in longer lines because maybe that way the words will create a ripple and you won’t feel so alone and then you realize that ripples go out and out and they never come back and so maybe you’ll never know if you were heard or if anyone will know you existed or that you still exist and then you remember that one reason we write about the dead is because we want to make sure they continue to exist somehow but
if the person who loved you enough to want to keep you alive is
already dead does that mean you won’t exist because they aren’t
there anymore to remember you? And then I think of how at night my
gaze goes up and up and if I look between the burning stars not at them there’s nothing to stop me from falling into the darkness and never coming back and then I realize that I’m never coming back anyway and my whole life is a ripple that will never reverse direction and isolation feels like a normal human condition but then I wonder if our ripples might tangle together somewhere out there like light beams meeting each other at last and the loneliness might become more bearable because many ripples can make a stream or a current or even a river and then the rush might take us away from ourselves and into something larger and maybe we’ll all begin to exist again the way a butterfly breaks the silence
The Author
Lisa Suhair Majaj is the author of Geographies of Light, winner of the Del Sol Press Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared widely, and was used in the exhibit Aftermath: The Fallout of War- America and the Middle East, Harn Museum of Art, 2016. She has co-edited three collections of essays on international women writers, and written two children’s books. A Palestinian-American, she lives in Cyprus, where she wrote this poem under an extremely strict lockdown.
Lisa Suhair Majaj, Cyprus