sara@mhuxj.UUCP (TRIGS) (02/07/86)
*** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE *** FOR CHARLOTTE ELENA: THREE WEEKS AND ONE DAY Out of a restless dream I wake and Charlotte, with your three weeks worth of woe you lie there scratching against silence, writhing as in an agony of darkness. And yet what agony can you know? What dark experience can pierce your sleep? I sing: Charlotte the world is full of lights... Outside the night is quiet, save those sounds which tell me, in a speech beyond your years of the coming day: the first train in the morning and (muffled in snow) the sounds of commuters' cars. Sometimes their headlights climb up through our windows casting ominous shapes upon the walls. I sing: Charlotte the world is full of bells... In our close room there are no sounds but the occasional rattle of the radiators or relentless ticking from a mantel clock. Charlotte the world is full of hours. And yet you lie, it seems, in a primordial pain broken out of sleep, as to another birth. Can it be that waking, which so comforts us even in darkness, reminds you disturbingly of that painful hour? Or do you carry troubles from some Platonic "other life" about with you? As it were, trailing such clouds of glory, we walk about the room dancers to a lullaby, and while your cradle teeters on the brink, heedless, you sleep again, and I am left troubled and awake to that loud world so full lights and bells and hours.