happiness

Feeling more like this today, like I've returned to The Happiness as described by Jack Hirschman. (Hint - click on the underlined phrase "The Happiness" and you'll be taken to a website with information about the poem and author.)


The Happiness
Jack Hirschman
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There's a happiness, a joy
in one soul, that's been
buried alive in everyone
and forgotten.

It isn't your barroom joke
or tender, intimate humor
or affections of friendliness
or big, bright pun.

They're the surviving survivors
of what happened when happiness
was buried alive, when
it no longer looked out

of today's eyes, and doesn't
even manifest when one
of us dies, we just walk away
from everything, alone

with what's left of us,
going on being human beings
without being human,
without that happiness.
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For those of you who don't deal well with poetry, AHEM, I feel like the past few days I've done what the poet describes, I've walked away and gone on being human without being human, I've buried real joy and contented myself with the barroom jokes and gawdy puns of crude salfivic humor; and this is a scary thing, that I (or anybody) can ignore the hollow place left behind when happiness/love take their leave, even for a few days.

And its ironic that when two people who love eachother are in an ongoing argument and aren't speaking to eachother, our language tends to label the first person to restore contact as "giving in," as somehow weaker than the other - and this locks both in misery, in apathy, in the false stoicism of supposed strength.

-tn

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