Echo and Narcissus
__________________________

I, Echo, stand unheard and voiceless -

Save the last fragments of your voice in the air.

Yet what a language there is in the looking and feeling; in the isolation and repudiation!

Here is a silent story of unimaginable pain, of rejection and loneliness

Of hatred and love in equal measure.

I don't see your face but the back of your neck as you gaze endlessly upon your reflection

Seeking and never finding; lost and always out of reach.

Over the long years I have watched you fading into something insubstantial;

I have watched the stillness of your grief, transfixed upon tragedy

Yet rejoicing in your own triumph over death.

I see Someone is there for you,

But for me he is not there, he lures you away from me

He consumes you, he repudiates me.

Each moment is a moment of utter contradiction.

Surely you live a life of confused imaginings where life can be death;

Where love can be hate; where continued being can be total annihilation

And birth must mean death.

That world is not mine. It is your world

Created out of perpetual re-enactment of a primal tragedy.

Amid the wordless language of your still gaze upon the lake, communication is complete.

I too am grieving for you, my heart's desire. I too am searching for you never to find you.

I too am repudiated yet I too still remain loyal, I also have been annihilated -

Yet I manage, by inches, to exist.

For myself, only love and desire remain in an echo of what once was.

It is desire that consumes me, yet desire helps me to survive.

In eternal loyalty I resolve to stand sentinel at your grief

'Till death us will unite.

 

Althea