House of Language

We used to read the same poems once, bearers
of destiny, my peers, fellow travellers in writing,
who now assault and defend the city.
The city where my mother lives, or to be more precise,
is dying together with my old Siamese cat,
who used to curl up in the lap of many
among you as it sits in hers. In our youth,
the epics were the aesthetics. Time, though,
has confirmed our different reading
of poetry, and our different interpretations. Some,
perhaps less mindful of form, learned from the tortured,
whereas others, constantly counting the syllables
and checking the rhyme, learned from the torturers.
For some, poems were a guidebook
to enduring even unbearable pain, to others
a manual for inflicting unbearable suffering.
Today there is ample proof, indisputable and soaked in blood,
to the many different meanings of a poem, just as there is
innumerable, even more indisputable and bloodstained
evidence, to the many purposes of the knife.