"Island of Yesterday" Receive thy new possessor: one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. ─John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I It is the window of a prison they left him And an island. That fatal year, with frenzy and a goal A goal that still reverberated in his vein during Those sleepless nights, He faced the impossible and the multitude. Battlefield, blood, reeking breath, memory Religion and philosophy all trapped. In a heated discussion of life and death. He was an Achilles, mighty and fearless His men used to call him. Never, never An Achilles who was swollen with his feet. His feet, well shaped by birth and dimmed in The sobbing Styx, en-ti-re-ly. A Beowulf, he was The epic and the sole man that Pulled heaven and earth apart. Or He should be the great Ozymandias King of kings. And yet even Ozymandias cheated No death and passed into obscurity. They offered him nothing but Scylla and Charybdis: Meet the great Ozymandias in his Ruin or become self-exiled Moses. He knew the Holy Book better. So he came down to this island An island of his own. The days he cursed Failing him to join the ghostly comrades. (He would have better resisted solitude that way.) The nights, he wished he had chosen to be The decaying legends of bards, and talked History with the mighty and the glorious. Secluded The dark cell embraced his full existence As he kept Sunken, To its hellish deep. A sealed window allowed Great view from the cell but he never came Close to it. A view to the open was A view to the land he did not claim, the kingdom He never built. A view led not to the glory, whispering long Deceased dreams, of yesterday. He would not have come close to it. Then it follows that one day a most Unexpected guest comes to pass. A sky-lark That perches on the window. They say the bird, a rare species, could Not even show up in the mainland where The spring echoes the sound of nature. The bird has scarcely argued for its presence Before it lets loose the melodies. Yet he would not have listened to it. For the sky-lark sings Beauty that he let pass all Too easily, in the years when he went to war, in the years Before it, he would not have listened To the tunes that seem to ridicule his Island of one’s own. So sings the sky-lark. The bird, they say Never sings but when it does The world stands still, for it could not be stopped till Overpowered by death. A death song celebrating life, even right in the Burning of it. Like the phoenix reborn from the ashes of fire. Like the spring roses Budding against the pain of winter The sky-lark never sings but it cracks Of life. He listens. And the window breaks. -- For what is writing? Writing is always about negotiating the real of life! 如果在冬夜，我，一個旅人 http://www.wretch.cc/blog/calvinoblog --

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