Here’s another Oldie, dredged up for this week’s Poetry Pantry at Poets United. I was pretty sure this one was previously published, but my search for it at Eggs Over Tokyo kept coming up blank, so I guess I’m just misremembering.
At any rate…
Oubliette: Myth Of Captivity
There is no bottom.
The longer I am here
the more deeply I understand:
‘bottom’ is a myth.
Your meager chains and locks
are nothing to me now;
I surrender to them easily,
remember starlight,
sink into my escape.
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More goodies from The Pantry HERE
Scrambled, Not Fried 
I love the sinking feeling that rolls out in this poem – somehow it feels ok to forget
I wonder how many of us have dreaded finding ourselves in such a situation. I might have got out forty years ago but think they’d only find my bones today!
Your reference to Tokyo and being at the bottom trapped reminds me too much of Murakami’s “the wind up bird chronicles” for it to be a coincidence… but I might be wrong.
I’ve always wondered what an oubliette looked like from bottom to top. Now I know. But, surely, “bottom” is not a myth. “‘There must be some way out of here,’ said the Joker to the Thief.”
I love that remembering starlight is his means of escape.
I find myself wondering what kind of collective captivity we could be in. The idea of no bottom kind of terrorizes. I like to stand on my feet.
Interesting…it took me a moment to shift my perspective from picturing the chains to actually allowing the poem to bring me back to the image itself.
Interesting poem. Guess you’ll have to find some way to escape, if you really want to.
This poem makes me think of what it would be like feeling trapped and looking up! That is quite a photo and quite a poem.
This is incredibly beautiful. Puts me in mind of Viktor Frankl and Nelson Mandela and how they persevered through torture and imprisonment holding to the truth inside themselves. Really lovely. Thank you for sharing.