By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

NOTHING is coming. It is as if my mind is at rest, admitting only nothing. I wait. What is waiting? I thought for a while, “Why are people who serve in restaurants called, waiters?” And why is a woman attending to a royal woman or a high-ranking noblewoman called, lady-in-waiting? But there are many kinds of waiting, such as the ones I described in a poem I wrote on December 2015:

Waiting

i know how it is to wait
for a rabbi to seat men and women together
in a synagogue
for nuns to become cardinals and together
announce “Habemus Papam!”
to see women fly high beyond the glass ceiling together
breaking open barriers, breaking open the sky

i know how it is to wait
like Estragon and Vladimir
beside a seedling that has fully-grown into a tree
or beside branches of mango flowers
falling from a girdled tree
retelling its fetal beginnings, and fatal end
in slow, broken sentences
as dark signals the passing of another tree

I know how it is to wait
for the eyes to open and to listen
to any word, a sound, a snore
a flinch of a finger, a quiver on the lips
of a friend, a beloved dreaming in a coma

I know how it is to wait
in the corridors, for a footstep
a knock at the door, a whisper
a cry from the womb
a ripple in a river running slow
a heartbeat, in the dark silences of tomorrow

Waiting can result still in nothing, even after waiting for a long time. Finally, as you realize, or even if you don’t, you’re still doing it, as if it were your only destiny.  The distance between then, now, and forever collapses into a continuum. The words linger on, and you convince yourself of its worth, under a vacuum, or floating in the aimless sphere of not knowing. Some wait forever, as described in an excerpt from a poem I wrote 17 June 2015, entitled Floating in a River:

the distance collapses on a screen
and i could feel the rain
with your voice pouring on my skin
i am wet all over
as you speak of downpours
that can sink old ships
and i devour your words, still

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