How do I measure you, rag and bone girl?
How do I figure your weight in this world?
In volumes displaced? In litres of waste?
In output, or throughput, or level of taste?
Your dress size and shoe size and hat size don't tally
When force becomes form exponentially,
But scansion and metre can't frame up the lot
When line, hue, and balance don't fit in the pot
With the things you know true, and the things you've been through.
How could what you are not be more than you do?
Can your measure be taken in negative space?
In the good or the harm, in the curse or embrace
That gives lift to the struggling, or hope to the lost,
Or stands with the fearful to raise the sum cost
Of attacking? Are you just momentum effect,
And a wing-flap that midwifes a hurricane get
Of another mind's brilliance, another soul's dreams
While you struggle to burst mediocrity's seams?
Or if worth may be known by one's friends and one's foes,
Your having of neither -- not such that it shows, --
Gives too scanty a sum to contain the equation;
Your heart and your hands and the healing abrasions
That testify effort, and caring and strain
To bear up what you can, and from hatred refrain.
You're not adding up. You're epitrite fractions,
And candyfloss lightning with endless redactions,
And I cannot tell if your world-weight is less than
Or equal, or more than the cost of your elan,
Your ennui, your ardor, your hopes, and your dinner;
You'd not matter more, whether richer, or thinner.
No eye, and no hand, whether mortal or im
Can frame what is fearful or fine in your trim,
In the mad, asymmetrical force that is you,
And if you weren't here, there's no way to guess true
If the world's been made better, if you were worthwhile
If the journey was worth every long, lonely mile,
Of if, like the sand on eternity's shore,
You're a self-obsessed blip like a billion before,
And a billion to come. No different, no better;
A life, nothing more, with no mystical fetter
Of fate's validation to set you apart
As you live, and you die, and wink out in the dark.
I don't know your value. It cannot be guessed;
Let the words on your grave lay that riddle to rest.
The Weight of Dust and a Shadow by clue
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