I’d like to share a poem from one of the most unique and brilliant contemporary poets in the English language, Anne Carson. This poem is taken from her book Decreation, poems, opera, essays. The idea of decreation stems from Simone Weil, who sees it as “an undoing of the creature in us”, an undoing of the self. Anne Carson explores various ways in which decreation is possible or manifests itself, for example, through sleep, madness, love or immersion in God’s light. Three women in history who have battled with this subject are elegised: Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil.
Part of Anne Carson’s own decreation experiences was the death of her mother which she writes about in a series of poems at the beginning of the book:
“In the ancient struggle of breath against death, one more sleep given.
We took an offer on the house.
In the sum of the parts
where are the parts?
Silently (there) leaves and windows wait.
Our empty clothesline cuts the sloping night.
And making their lament for a lost apparel of celestial light
angels and detritus call out as they flow past our still latched gate.”