Deep Emotion – how can
I Explain it the Next Day?²
We Find Fault with Humans – because
There is no Window in their Breast that All
Might See their Inward Thoughts & Feelings³
A Thousand Spleens bear us a Thousand Ways⁴
Do you always Trust your First initial Feeling?
Special Knowledge holds True, bears Believing⁵
All manner of Feelings are Locked up within my
Breast and all manner of Events Summon them out⁶
Don’t Practice to Feel Good: practice to feel More⁷
We Interpret in Harmonious Verses what the Soul
In its wonder feels vaguely in Sterile Emotions⁸
Writing in the Red Light of Emotion –
And Not in the White Light of Truth⁹
Our Good depends on the Quality
And Breadth of our Emotion¹⁰
¹ Richard Eberhart, The Soul Longs to Return Whence it Came
² Ryōkan tr. John Stevens, Intermittent Rain
³ Aesop tr. Thomas James, Jupiter, Neptune, Minerva, and Momus
⁴ William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis
⁵ Stephanie Nicks, Crystal
⁶ Jamaica Kincaid, Blackness
⁷ Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy
⁸ C.P. Cavafy tr. Rae Dalven, Correspondence According to Baudelaire
⁹ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
¹⁰ George Eliot, Middlemarch