Deprivation Game

Each year I play at deprivation as harvest season passes, and light retreats southward, and pliable life turns brittle and spare. 

I play to remember the ancestors' work when our world was young and their year was old,

to feel their hunger as they waited, shivering, to feast on the hope of the sun's return. 

I play to remember my grandparents' work: they were young and had no choices...

To remember the way that my life worked when I was young and had no choice...

I play to feel the symbolic lack, because it feels symbolically fair.  I crave a deep chilling emptiness, to learn what that vacuum pulls out of me.

I bathe with the ends of soap and dry myself with threadbare towels.

I wear socks with holes and tatter-edged clothes, stained with work and living. 

I stop buying food, make meals of the last dry beans and shriveled potatoes

just to feel the relief of dwindling choices.

I make simple dances in the thin light, 

my makeshift means as my grateful meditation...

Until a day the light grows fuller.

All can go young!

Fix quickly what needs fixing;

Replace, restock, renew.  

A miracle fabricated from waiting to feast.  

A hope for me, a hope for the world. 

© Laura Seale, 2013

Harvested potato field
Photo by Evelyn Simak from Wikimedia Commons