Tag: identity

The Weight of Existence: Sisyphus’ New Dawn

Franz von Stuck, Sisyphus (1920)
Oil on canvas, 103 × 89 cm. Galerie Ritthaler, Munich.
© Collection Galerie Ritthaler.

“Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.”
(“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”)
—Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942)

But perhaps he was mistaken.
Perhaps the truth is simpler:
When the stone is gone, the man remains. 

 

Sisyphus Undone; or, It Was Tuesday

by Donald S. Yarab

He rose, as ever, with the morning’s breath,
the hill still steep, the silence oddly wide.
No stone to greet him with its weight or will—
no groan of earth, no task to be defied.

The gods were gone. Their laughter had grown faint,
or else the air refused to carry sound.
The path he wore through centuries lay bare,
a scar now healing into senseless ground.

He searched for signs: a crack, a trace, a mark,
but found no proof that toil had ever been.
His hands, once strong with strain, now idle hung,
still shaped by burdens long dissolved within.

He sat. The dust rose lightly at his knee.
A lark began to sing, then flew away.
The sky, untroubled, held no word for him.
The world had turned. It was another day.

What is the self when labor fades to wind?
What is the myth once struggle slips its chain?
He breathed. No answer stirred the lucid air.
The hill was whole. The man was left, and plain.

I Am Undone: A Descent Through Unraveling

The vague glimmer of a head suspended in space
 (1891, Lithograph)
Odilon Redon (1840–1916)

Author’s Note

This poem emerged from reflection upon the moments when something—unspoken, unnamed—shatters the center from which we speak and think. It is not always violence that undoes us, but stillness, silence, a breath held too long.

I Am Undone is not a narrative of healing, nor of hope. It is the descent, rendered faithfully: from coherence to fragmentation, from identity to question, from the sentence to the unsaid. It may speak to trauma, or grief, or loss—or any of life’s other vicissitudes—but it seeks no cause. Only witness.

Let it stand as a record of that moment when words fail, and still we reach for them.

I Am Undone

by Donald S. Yarab

I. Recognition

It came not with fury, nor with fire.
Not a blow, but a breath withheld.
A stillness uncoiling in the spine.
I did not cry out. I did not fall.
I said only—I am undone.
And the words were true,
though I did not yet know
how much they would mean.

 

II. Unbinding

The star chart curled into ash.
Landmarks dimmed, receded,
folded into fog.
I had names once—
for the road, the self, the longing.
They rusted in my mouth.
I said again, am I—
but the word faltered.
Was I I? Was am still?
Was undone the end, or only
a door swinging inward with no floor?

 

III. Disorientation

I wandered, perhaps.
Or stood still and the world wandered past.
The days no longer linked.
Events occurred—but not to me.
Faces mouthed shapes I could not
hear or remember.
I touched a wall that had always been there.
It crumbled under my hand.
I called it home, or meant to.
Or once had.
I think.

Un—done—I am—undone am I—
I am…am I…?

 

IV. Unmooring

And the past…
no, the shape before the past—
was it mine?
Or borrowed from the eyes of others?
Their eyes are gone.
The mirror does not
answer.
I meant to say a thing—
some thing—
a small
        thing—
but the mouth no longer forms
what the mind no longer sends.

There is no forward.
There is no back.
There is no—

(no is)

 

V. Dissolution

I think I said—I was—
no. I had said.
Once.

Undone.
It was the word. I said it.
Before.
Or after.
I do not—

No shape to the day.
No frame to the thought.
They come—go—
without edge.

The name of the thing
was… not there.
And the word for that—
what was the word?
The word is gone.
The knowing is
not.

I am
        am I
                un—
        not
     not done—
            not I—
      I—was

(was?)

And now—