sentence chords

from ursula leguin’s introduction to the left hand of darkness:

the artist deals with what cannot be said in words.  the artist whose medium is fiction does this in words.  the novelist says in words what cannot be said in words…a sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.

and, the story’s first sentence:

i’ll make my report as if i told a story, for i was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of imagination.

dao and poo.

How can you get very far,
If you don’t know Who You Are?
How can you do what you ought,
If you don’t know What You’ve Got?
And if you don’t know Which to Do
Of all the things in front of you,
Then what you’ll have when you are through
Is just a mess without a clue
Of all the best that can come true
If you know What and Which and Who.

–Benjamin Hoff, from the Tao of Pooh

sirens

There were so many
So many sirens today
Screaming emergency
When maybe
It
 Isn’t
                Maybe
Everything will just be okay
Oh say
It’s all
Going to be okay
I wanted
I wanted
To warn you
Those sirens
So false and glittering
Get out now
That black water
Swallows us
We deserve to swim
In a lake of peace
With waterfalls
And the wherewithal
To keep
Some semblance of grace
Don’t make me trace out
These phantoms for you
My love is true
I know when to walk away