Spring

A feeling of longing is very unique. You start to yearn for the thing you love but lost. You can say that you yearn for something when you hope the thing that is gone to be back. Between absence and wish, impossibility and possibility, emptiness and sweetness, there is a feeling of longing.

Some scholars say that drawings, writings, and yearnings all share the same origin. For poets, this definitely is a fact. A rake of thoughts becomes writings, a rake of shapes becomes drawings, and a rake of hearts becomes yearnings. Poets draw with words and writings. And they are the ones who literally give shape to yearnings with writings and drawings. As such, these three’s next of kin is each other.

A yearning starts when you lose something, but there is one person who longs all the time without losing anything. If a longing takes a human form with two arms and legs, it will be the human we call Mother. Mothers yearn for their child even when the child is lying beside them. Mothers miss them, even more, when they leave them. We say inside humans, there are organs and blood, but, inside mothers, there’s only the yearning.

Today’s poem also features a mother who becomes a yearning herself. She wakes up crying, missing her son. She washes her son’s shoes even when her lower back is killing her. That is when her husband realizes that her body is a spring of yearning. Then, we might need to change the definition of a feeling of yearning. You start to yearn for someone at the moment you start to love them.