Everything and everyone are under pressure.
This poem is under pressure that I exert,
that the page limits, the screen limits.
Time is pushing it forward until I stop and then
Time pushes it into the past,
never stopping that push
no matter how hard I pull at it.
You are reading it now
and that takes some pressure off for a minute or two.
Take a breath here and read slower.
Think about decomposition.
“A word is elegy to what it signifies,” wrote Robert Hass.
Words die. Whole languages die.
I will die and that may be why I write –
in the hope that something goes on beyond my life.
I have stopped believing that there is anything after death.
I break like the lines of a poem.
I have stopped using stanzas,
stopped walking from room to room
as if I would find what I am looking for
in this gigantic house that in the end
is much too small to live in forever.
Pamela Milne
Milneville 