You redefine strength and I admire this the most. We often mistake resilience for never bending, when in reality the strongest people I have known are the ones who bend, absorb the blow, and still refuse to let bitterness become their personality.
I learned that lesson after moving countries and starting over. There were years when every setback felt like evidence that I had made the wrong decision. But looking back, I realise the victories that mattered the most were almost invisible. Like getting up the next morning, remaining curious instead of cynical, choosing generosity when disappointment would have been easier. Endurance is rarely dramatic. It is built from ordinary decisions repeated long after the applause has disappeared.
An indomitable spirit is not measured by what it survives, but by what it refuses to surrender. Some people keep their career, others keep their health, but the rarest achievement is keeping one’s sense of wonder. Marcus Aurelius wrote that “the impediment to action advances action”. I would say that the impediment also reveals character. Adversity does not create us so much as expose what we have been cultivating all along.
You have a remarkable gift for taking a word that risks becoming a cliché and restoring its original weight. By the end, “indomitable” no longer feels like a compliment reserved for heroes; it feels like a daily practice available to the rest of us. Tamara, your writing is so rare, and the reason I keep coming back to your work.
Yes for the bitterness point Nobody plans to become bitter, it's not a decision anyone makes. It accretes. You harden in a way that feels like wisdom from the inside, feels like you've finally stopped being naive, and meanwhile everyone around you can see you've just gotten smaller. Refusing that is harder than surviving the thing that tempted you toward it.
Curiosity as the thing you protect. I'd never have ranked it that high before, but you're right that it's the first casualty and almost nobody grieves it. People notice when they lose their health. They don't notice the day they stopped being interested in things. It just quietly goes, and they call the flatness that replaces it maturity.
I'll gently disagree with Marcus on one count, or maybe just with how he's usually quoted. The impediment advancing the action is true for the impediments you survive. But some obstacles don't advance anything. They just cost you, flat, no hidden tuition, no lesson in the envelope. I think the Stoics oversold the redemptive math a little. Not everything that hurts is teaching you something. Sometimes you cultivated the wonder in spite of the adversity, not because of it, and the adversity gets credit it didn't earn.
But your last line takes me where I hoped the poem would. Indomitable as a daily practice, not a medal. That's the demotion I wanted for the word. Take it down from the hero and hand it to the person getting up in a country that isn't theirs yet, choosing generous over cynical before coffee. Thank you for reading me this closely, and for bringing your own hard-won years to it, Céline! That's the real reply to the poem, not anything I could write back.
Careful! The poems that sound the most like me are usually the ones where I'm hiding the best. That "I" is doing a lot of work. Half of it I wrote for a version of myself I'm still trying to talk into existing. But I won't pretend it cost nothing to publish, so, thank you for reading it the generous way, Andrew!
There's a lot of Heraclitus swimming around in yours, the river you can't step in twice, and it sits oddly well next to the Tao. Two traditions that mostly never spoke arriving at the same shrug about permanence. I like that you put a challenge in the mouth of the one being broken. Most people picture the broken party as silent. You gave them koans instead.
The turn I'd resist a little is the dissolve at the end, not yesterday's, not tomorrow's, pure flux. Because the poem I wrote is actually the opposite claim. Something persists. The will is the thing that doesn't wash downstream with everything else. So we are at an interesting standoff, you and I. Your version says the self that can't be broken is the self that was never solid enough to grab. Mine says the self that can't be broken is the one hard part the river runs around. Both get you unbreakable. One by being water, one by being the stone. I know which I reached for. But yours might be the wiser exit.
Battling metaphors? I see it differently. Both metaphors may be saying the same message just with different tongues of the times. Whether in metaphor you be stone or water the result is the same. You are not broken. That is the message.
Fair! I was maybe enjoying the standoff more than the standoff deserved. You're right that the metaphor is the vehicle and the cargo arrives the same either way. Stone or water, the driver walks away.
I'll hold onto one small distinction though, just because it interests me. The two routes to unbroken feel different from the inside. The stone version costs effort, all that clenching, the will doing constant work to stay intact. The water version costs nothing, it survives by having nothing rigid to snap. So the message is identical, you're not broken, but the price is not. One of them you pay for daily. The other you get for free by giving up the very solidity that could break. Which is why most of us pick stone even though water is wiser. We'd rather be unbroken and tired than unbroken and dissolved. But you've got the heart of it. Not broken. That's the line that matters, and the rest is just me admiring the machinery.
The strongest people are rarely the loudest. They simply refuse to negotiate with despair. That, perhaps, is what endurance really is. Don’t let a uffering become an identity. History remembers empires for their victories, but it remembers individuals for the defeats they outlived.
What I admire is that your poem never begs to be called resilient. It simply is. That's the highest compliment I can pay it: it doesn't describe strength; it leaves the reader feeling a little more difficult to defeat.
"Refuse to negotiate with despair" is good, and I would add that despair is a very patient negotiator. It doesn't come for you in the crisis. It waits for the ordinary afternoon when you're tired and it offers you something that sounds like rest.
That last line of yours is the nicest thing anyone's said about the poem, so I'll just take it and not spoil it by performing modesty. Though I'll admit the not-begging was the hardest part to get right. A poem about strength wants to raise its voice. Most of the work was talking it back down. Thank you, Clara!
Your poem suggests that being indomitable is about refusing to let circumstances write your identity. Resilience is measured by the consistency of the choices we make after the storm passes. Character is built in those ordinary, repeated decisions that no audience ever sees. You capture that strength beautifully, without turning it into spectacle. That restraint is remarkable, and it’s one of the qualities that makes your poetry so compelling, Tamara.
The after is the part nobody wants to hear about. The storm has good production values. Thunder, stakes, a clear before and after. You point at an ordinary day three weeks later when no one's watching and you make the small correct choice again, bored out of your mind, no witnesses. That's where it actually gets decided.
I'd push on one thing. I don't think the silent choices build character so much as reveal what was already essential. You find out what you're made of in the unglamorous stretch, sure. But the material was there before the test. The repetition just audits it.
And thank you for noticing the restraint, Alexander! It was deliberate. A poem about not performing strength can't afford to flex, or it eats itself.
The reason changes depending on the day, honestly. Some mornings I think people read for the argument. Then a poem like this goes out and the inbox tells me otherwise. It's the nerve people want touched, not the case made well. Glad you liked it, Joel! Thank you for staying.
Integrity's a funny thing to write toward. The second you announce it you've probably lost it. I was after something smaller and more stubborn. Not being good. Just not folding. Thank you, Ian!
The loophole is you simply don’t mention it by name. And you didn’t.
Little thing about integrity: it’s actually more about constitution than good works. In fact, to do the right thing, there are times where you have to do - at least in the short term - the wrong thing. There are those simply too benign to sacrifice for the bigger picture.
Right, the not-naming was the whole trick! And yes on constitution over conduct. The ledger model of integrity never worked for me, this many good deeds against that many bad ones, tally at the end. It's more like grain running through wood. You can see which way a person splits under pressure. The benign point is the sharp one though. I think a lot of people mistake their own softness for principle. They've just never been asked to pay for anything. Real constitution shows up the day the right thing wears the wrong clothes and you do it anyway, knowing how it'll look. Some folks can't. They'd rather stay clean in the eyes of the room than be right and misread for it.
I’m having just as much fun reading the comments and your replies.😊 such that I’ve had to read your delightful poem several more times. I kept getting reminded of a similar brilliant resilience.
‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul’
You know even though I knew of Invictus and its influence on Mandela, I had no idea of Henley’s dark ordeal in writing Invictus until your poem took me back there. The comments are not better than the poem, I just love reading how we all apply our own experiences as we relate to it followed by your succinct responses. Your poem, just 16 lines had a similar effect on me, sure it prompted but it is SO much more the point.
Henley wrote that flat on his back after they took his leg, which is the detail that makes the line survive its own fame. It got quoted to death by people who'd never had anything taken from them. But the man had earned every syllable, and “Invictus” means unconquered, which is close enough to my title that I should probably admit the debt.
And the comments being better than the poem, yes, that keeps happening. I am so happy my comment section is quite unique on Substack. I wrote sixteen lines and then people arrived with Hillman and Seneca and their own hard decades, and my part starts looking like the prompt rather than the point.
The Sphinx's original riddle had an answer that was also “human”, and it killed everyone who missed it. They went looking for something exotic when the answer was sitting in the chair.
Your version is the better question though. Oedipus answers “man” and walks away, riddle solved, done. Nobody has to live inside the answer afterwards. Answer “a woman” and you've bought the whole apparatus. What she survives, what she carries, what she isn't allowed to say out loud on the way through.
And the loving her more sometimes, I get that. The one who asks is more interesting than the one who answers. Answers close. Questions keep you company.
yes … after all that is what your beautiful poem does … n’est-ce pas ? my first comment was shallow … and reflects a bad day … J’en suis désolé, Tamara. et votre réponse toujours si généreuse … et juste !
Still, I can’t help reading it as a riddle … as the questioner provokes the reader and asks to be discovered … and she does it with these so strong and rebellious words … what she isn’t allowed to say ?
No apology needed. Bad days tend to produce the comments that go somewhere. The polished ones just applaud.
On the riddle, though, careful…. :) The Sphinx doesn't want to be discovered. She wants the right answer, which is a different appetite entirely. A riddle hoping to be solved is only a hint in costume. Hers had a body count.
People expect that not-allowed part to be scandalous, something buried. Usually it's the flattest thing on the shelf. “This hurt.” “I'm tired.” “I didn't want to.” Nobody forbids it, exactly. It just never gets invited, and after a while you stop offering. The poem shouts instead, and shouting is permitted. It's the small plain sentence that costs.
No the Sphinx doesn't want to be discovered ... not completely so ... you are right ... Je ne crois pas qu'on veux être totalement compris ou découvert ... juste assez, oui ... mais il y aura toujours une part de mystère, d'ombre, de secret ...
I have a feeling that if one (Oedipus ? or just anyone) doesn't have the answer she seeks, then she doesn't really kill him, but her action then is that she disappears ... she just goes away, leaving him alone, disappointed and in tears, having missed the chance of really meeting that one amazing, magic and wonderful being. A sort of death actually ... a missing that will hurt a whole lifetime.
Dans mon univers ... le Sphinx n'est pas quelqu'un qui tue ... c'est une femme qui ne demande qu'une chose : d'être écoutée, comprise, prise par la main ... pour danser ... danser ... er rire.
That small plain sentence ... mon attention reste là ... la phrase si petite, si douce ... qui invite dans son silence à être prise par les bras, consolée, peut être, ou juste pour l'instant d'une tendresse ... 🦋💕
Careful with your version because it might be the crueller one. Killing at least grants a meeting. Disappearing means he never even knew what he failed. But here's the part of the myth people forget. When Oedipus answers correctly, she throws herself from the rock. She dies of being solved. Not of losing. So your instinct about the part left in shadow is in the story already, and it's structural, not decorative…. she exists only as long as something in her stays unanswered. Juste assez, oui, which makes the hand-taking harder than it sounds. To be understood enough to dance and not so much that there's nothing left standing there. Most people can't calibrate it. They either don't try or they solve you completely and wonder where you went.
Nobody's trained to just receive a plain thing without immediately fixing it. Merci, André!
Oui, elle se jette dans l’abime … c’est vrai. Ainsi elle « disparaît ». Sa mission est accomplie. C’est la version de Sophocle.
J’ai beaucoup lu sur le Sphinx … et je la vois très différente … Dans certaines versions moins connues du Mythe elle est la mère d’Œdipe ! Surprenant, je m’en rends bien compte !!! parfois, il me semble qu’elle est même immortelle !
C’est cette version que j’ai retenu pour mes pièces de théâtre … et celle qui se promène sans cesse dans ma tête… j’ai fait l’erreur d’oublier d’établir cette énorme différence dans ma réponse à vos commentaires … je vous dois des excuse (encore une fois … décidément !).
Cela dit, that small plain sentence continues to haunt my thoughts … c’est la part de mystère ?
There is the worst, which requires the standing in the face of it all. And the stiff board spine, rigid, unyielding, unbreakable. Wind and rain, thunder, lightning of life, the bitter trying to rip your soul, and tear you down.
And then the ember, the quiet ember coming to life after the thrashing, after the storm. “Unrelenting power”, gathered, learned from other worst times. “I can and will do this again and again” - resilience, yes. But something more, and I struggle to name it but I feel it. I believe it might be the balm of knowing and that knowing, for me, trumps all.
The thing you're struggling to name might be closer to a memory than a virtue? Resilience gets talked about like a muscle, something you have. What you describe sounds more like evidence. You've been here before, you came out, and the record exists whether or not you feel strong on any given morning. The balm isn't in the strength. It's in the file.
Which matters because feeling doesn't cooperate. Some days you have nothing. But the knowing sits underneath regardless of mood, and it isn't asking you to be brave, just to consult the record. Faith needs no proof. This has proof. That's why it holds when everything else has gone quiet.
Seneca wrote “vindica te tibi” to Lucilius as an imperative, in the second person, about time… reclaim your hours before they are spent for you. You've swung it around into an infinitive and pointed it at a life you haven't lived. Different instrument.
My poem's whole business is title and ownership. “I was never its to own” is the claim being staked. So on the plain reading, no, it doesn't apply.
The sharper version of your point, though, is one someone else in this thread got to first, so I'll hand you the better weapon. Résistance still lets the storm write the agenda. Standing is a posture that needs something to push against, and a self defined by what it withstands is not quite a self reclaimed. That's fair! My poem stops at the standoff. I've said as much elsewhere here.
Where you overreach is “never once”. That's a verdict on my life, not a reading of 16 lines, and it's a rather grand thing to know about someone from a page.
You are very gracious. My original comment was supposed to be in quotes as I got it somewhere else and then I was asking, only asking, if the quote could possibly Apply.
This is timely for me. I won’t count myself among the few in the world who truly embody this, but I am among the living, and this reminds me of what it has taken to make it to forty, and what I should be aspiring towards to make it to whatever cause outside of my control ends me. I don’t mean to sound bleak—reading this took me far from bleakness, and immediately started fitting itself to music in my head, for what that’s worth. Thank you for this.
40 is a strange checkpoint. Nobody warns you that it arrives with an inventory attached. You just start noticing what things cost, retroactively, and the bill was always there, you'd just been too busy to read it.
The music thing isn't nothing, by the way. Say what for that's worth again and I'll fight you about it. The poem going straight to melody in your head means it bypassed the arguing part of you entirely and went somewhere older. That's the best result I could hope for and I can't engineer it. Only you can do that half.
And the bit about the cause outside your control, I'd leave that alone. Not bleak, just accurate! Everyone's ending arrives from somewhere they weren't looking. The aspiration is about what you carry when it shows up.
"Say what for that's worth again and I'll fight you about it."
Yes, you got me, there! As I think about it, "for what that's worth" is probably a phrase best excised from the vocabulary of anyone who means to stand by whatever they say. I appreciate you calling me out on that.
The French version is worse: “je dis ça, je dis rien”. (I say this, I say nothing). Said constantly, usually right after saying something devastating, and it functions as a small legal shield. What it actually does is pre-discount the goods before anyone's offered a price. You've decided the sentence is worth less than it is, out loud, in advance, so that nobody else gets the pleasure.
Anyway, no fighting. I was being too much about a preposition.
Thanks for taking it in the spirit it was meant, which was affectionate!
I can hear someone saying, « Je dis ça, je dis rien » in a tone related to that with which someone might say, “An’ I tell ya for nuthin’…” (although context can completely change the meaning behind that one.)
There is a proverb, and you’re probably familiar with it, that says, “Blows from a friend can be trusted.” Our exchanges have given me plenty of reason to trust the playful affection behind your combat, and the good intention behind your criticism, so no worries!
“Je dis ça, je dis rien” is the perfect find because it does something English can't manage. It launches the missile and disclaims ownership in the same breath, and everyone knows exactly what happened, and there's no comeback. The Cockney version has more sincerity in it, oddly. It's offering the thing for free. The French one is pure deniability with a shrug bolted on.
The proverb is Proverbs 27:6, and the second half is the interesting part, the one nobody quotes. Something about an enemy's kisses being profuse. So the whole thing is a comparison, not a compliment. Faithful wounds versus multiplied kisses. It's telling you the affection is the tell, not the blow.
But you've read the exchange right, and I'd rather be argued with by someone who thinks I'm worth the trouble :)
When punctuation embodies true senses, when words are created to make sense of life rather than giving birth to it; when meaning emerges in the colours of the earth and the heartbeats of the wild. I ADORE!
The punctuation point deserves more credit than it gets. In a poem the commas are breath marks. Where I put a full stop is where I'm telling you to stop breathing for a second. That's the closest thing writing has to physically reaching into someone. And thank you from the bottom of my heart, Otilia!
Or it does both, in that order, and you don't get to know which one you're in while it's happening. The burning doesn't scream it is construction. Thank you for reading me, Paulina!
That line pairs oddly well with the usual definition people carry, which is closer to poetry decorating the truth, dressing a plain fact up so it goes down easier. Popova's claim is bigger. The truth arrives inert. Facts don't come with their own significance attached, they just sit there being the case. Meaning is the thing we add, and poetry is one of the few tools built specifically for the adding, putting poets in a slightly uncomfortable spot if you follow it out. It means the meaning isn't discovered, sitting in the truth waiting to be found. It's conferred. We hand it over. And that's a real responsibility because you can give a truth the wrong meaning just as easily as the right one, and a good enough poem will make the wrong one feel inevitable. Popova trusts the instrument. Most days I do too. But it cuts both directions, and I think she'd agree the blade doesn't care which way you swing it.
Beautifully put, especially the last line. I do wonder about 'truth arrives inert,' though. That feels like the philosophical hinge. I find myself thinking poetry reveals or deepens meaning more than it confers it.
Your distinction is the better one, and I think you are right to correct the verb. “Confer” suggests poetry hands meaning over from outside, like a title bestowed, when what actually happens is nearer to what you say, a revealing, a deepening of something that was already latent in the thing itself. The poem does not add the meaning. It clears the ground so the meaning already present can finally be seen. Less a gift, more an excavation.
Though I would hold one small corner for “confer”, in this narrow sense… sometimes the revealing is so transformative that the line between uncovering and creating genuinely blurs. When a poem shows you a grief you did not know you carried, was that revealed or made? I cannot always tell. Perhaps that undecidability is the hinge, not either verb alone.
Thank you for catching the inert bit and pressing on it, Samir! You have found the seam I was not sure held.
I had an interesting exchange about this with Adam Knight who restacked my poem.
You redefine strength and I admire this the most. We often mistake resilience for never bending, when in reality the strongest people I have known are the ones who bend, absorb the blow, and still refuse to let bitterness become their personality.
I learned that lesson after moving countries and starting over. There were years when every setback felt like evidence that I had made the wrong decision. But looking back, I realise the victories that mattered the most were almost invisible. Like getting up the next morning, remaining curious instead of cynical, choosing generosity when disappointment would have been easier. Endurance is rarely dramatic. It is built from ordinary decisions repeated long after the applause has disappeared.
An indomitable spirit is not measured by what it survives, but by what it refuses to surrender. Some people keep their career, others keep their health, but the rarest achievement is keeping one’s sense of wonder. Marcus Aurelius wrote that “the impediment to action advances action”. I would say that the impediment also reveals character. Adversity does not create us so much as expose what we have been cultivating all along.
You have a remarkable gift for taking a word that risks becoming a cliché and restoring its original weight. By the end, “indomitable” no longer feels like a compliment reserved for heroes; it feels like a daily practice available to the rest of us. Tamara, your writing is so rare, and the reason I keep coming back to your work.
Yes for the bitterness point Nobody plans to become bitter, it's not a decision anyone makes. It accretes. You harden in a way that feels like wisdom from the inside, feels like you've finally stopped being naive, and meanwhile everyone around you can see you've just gotten smaller. Refusing that is harder than surviving the thing that tempted you toward it.
Curiosity as the thing you protect. I'd never have ranked it that high before, but you're right that it's the first casualty and almost nobody grieves it. People notice when they lose their health. They don't notice the day they stopped being interested in things. It just quietly goes, and they call the flatness that replaces it maturity.
I'll gently disagree with Marcus on one count, or maybe just with how he's usually quoted. The impediment advancing the action is true for the impediments you survive. But some obstacles don't advance anything. They just cost you, flat, no hidden tuition, no lesson in the envelope. I think the Stoics oversold the redemptive math a little. Not everything that hurts is teaching you something. Sometimes you cultivated the wonder in spite of the adversity, not because of it, and the adversity gets credit it didn't earn.
But your last line takes me where I hoped the poem would. Indomitable as a daily practice, not a medal. That's the demotion I wanted for the word. Take it down from the hero and hand it to the person getting up in a country that isn't theirs yet, choosing generous over cynical before coffee. Thank you for reading me this closely, and for bringing your own hard-won years to it, Céline! That's the real reply to the poem, not anything I could write back.
You are indomitable. And what an honor and privilege to have met you.
Don’t make me blush! It’s mutual.
“remaining curious instead of cynical” essential and well said!
Thank you, Cathie!
You finally wrote about yourself! Indomitable Tamara.
Careful! The poems that sound the most like me are usually the ones where I'm hiding the best. That "I" is doing a lot of work. Half of it I wrote for a version of myself I'm still trying to talk into existing. But I won't pretend it cost nothing to publish, so, thank you for reading it the generous way, Andrew!
I could imagine you saying to those that try to break you:
Is this you?
Is this me?
Is this everyone?
Do you know me?
Do you know the Tao?
Those that think they know
Do not
The Tao
Is the way
I am the way
I am the river
You step into
I am the flux
I am not
The one of yesterday
I am not
The one of tomorrow
There's a lot of Heraclitus swimming around in yours, the river you can't step in twice, and it sits oddly well next to the Tao. Two traditions that mostly never spoke arriving at the same shrug about permanence. I like that you put a challenge in the mouth of the one being broken. Most people picture the broken party as silent. You gave them koans instead.
The turn I'd resist a little is the dissolve at the end, not yesterday's, not tomorrow's, pure flux. Because the poem I wrote is actually the opposite claim. Something persists. The will is the thing that doesn't wash downstream with everything else. So we are at an interesting standoff, you and I. Your version says the self that can't be broken is the self that was never solid enough to grab. Mine says the self that can't be broken is the one hard part the river runs around. Both get you unbreakable. One by being water, one by being the stone. I know which I reached for. But yours might be the wiser exit.
Thank you for the poetic reply, Jim!
Battling metaphors? I see it differently. Both metaphors may be saying the same message just with different tongues of the times. Whether in metaphor you be stone or water the result is the same. You are not broken. That is the message.
Fair! I was maybe enjoying the standoff more than the standoff deserved. You're right that the metaphor is the vehicle and the cargo arrives the same either way. Stone or water, the driver walks away.
I'll hold onto one small distinction though, just because it interests me. The two routes to unbroken feel different from the inside. The stone version costs effort, all that clenching, the will doing constant work to stay intact. The water version costs nothing, it survives by having nothing rigid to snap. So the message is identical, you're not broken, but the price is not. One of them you pay for daily. The other you get for free by giving up the very solidity that could break. Which is why most of us pick stone even though water is wiser. We'd rather be unbroken and tired than unbroken and dissolved. But you've got the heart of it. Not broken. That's the line that matters, and the rest is just me admiring the machinery.
I would never duel with you. I’m smart enough to know when I’m overmatched.
The strongest people are rarely the loudest. They simply refuse to negotiate with despair. That, perhaps, is what endurance really is. Don’t let a uffering become an identity. History remembers empires for their victories, but it remembers individuals for the defeats they outlived.
What I admire is that your poem never begs to be called resilient. It simply is. That's the highest compliment I can pay it: it doesn't describe strength; it leaves the reader feeling a little more difficult to defeat.
"Refuse to negotiate with despair" is good, and I would add that despair is a very patient negotiator. It doesn't come for you in the crisis. It waits for the ordinary afternoon when you're tired and it offers you something that sounds like rest.
That last line of yours is the nicest thing anyone's said about the poem, so I'll just take it and not spoil it by performing modesty. Though I'll admit the not-begging was the hardest part to get right. A poem about strength wants to raise its voice. Most of the work was talking it back down. Thank you, Clara!
Your poem suggests that being indomitable is about refusing to let circumstances write your identity. Resilience is measured by the consistency of the choices we make after the storm passes. Character is built in those ordinary, repeated decisions that no audience ever sees. You capture that strength beautifully, without turning it into spectacle. That restraint is remarkable, and it’s one of the qualities that makes your poetry so compelling, Tamara.
The after is the part nobody wants to hear about. The storm has good production values. Thunder, stakes, a clear before and after. You point at an ordinary day three weeks later when no one's watching and you make the small correct choice again, bored out of your mind, no witnesses. That's where it actually gets decided.
I'd push on one thing. I don't think the silent choices build character so much as reveal what was already essential. You find out what you're made of in the unglamorous stretch, sure. But the material was there before the test. The repetition just audits it.
And thank you for noticing the restraint, Alexander! It was deliberate. A poem about not performing strength can't afford to flex, or it eats itself.
Sublime!
There’s a reason why we read Tam! There’s a reason! Thanks 🙏 for this.
The reason changes depending on the day, honestly. Some mornings I think people read for the argument. Then a poem like this goes out and the inbox tells me otherwise. It's the nerve people want touched, not the case made well. Glad you liked it, Joel! Thank you for staying.
A paean to integrity. Bravo.
Integrity's a funny thing to write toward. The second you announce it you've probably lost it. I was after something smaller and more stubborn. Not being good. Just not folding. Thank you, Ian!
The loophole is you simply don’t mention it by name. And you didn’t.
Little thing about integrity: it’s actually more about constitution than good works. In fact, to do the right thing, there are times where you have to do - at least in the short term - the wrong thing. There are those simply too benign to sacrifice for the bigger picture.
Right, the not-naming was the whole trick! And yes on constitution over conduct. The ledger model of integrity never worked for me, this many good deeds against that many bad ones, tally at the end. It's more like grain running through wood. You can see which way a person splits under pressure. The benign point is the sharp one though. I think a lot of people mistake their own softness for principle. They've just never been asked to pay for anything. Real constitution shows up the day the right thing wears the wrong clothes and you do it anyway, knowing how it'll look. Some folks can't. They'd rather stay clean in the eyes of the room than be right and misread for it.
A luxury afforded by a time of plenty. 😊
I’m having just as much fun reading the comments and your replies.😊 such that I’ve had to read your delightful poem several more times. I kept getting reminded of a similar brilliant resilience.
‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul’
Thankyou so much for sharing your work.🌹
You know even though I knew of Invictus and its influence on Mandela, I had no idea of Henley’s dark ordeal in writing Invictus until your poem took me back there. The comments are not better than the poem, I just love reading how we all apply our own experiences as we relate to it followed by your succinct responses. Your poem, just 16 lines had a similar effect on me, sure it prompted but it is SO much more the point.
Thanks again 🥂
I am grateful to have such attentive readers like you.
Henley wrote that flat on his back after they took his leg, which is the detail that makes the line survive its own fame. It got quoted to death by people who'd never had anything taken from them. But the man had earned every syllable, and “Invictus” means unconquered, which is close enough to my title that I should probably admit the debt.
And the comments being better than the poem, yes, that keeps happening. I am so happy my comment section is quite unique on Substack. I wrote sixteen lines and then people arrived with Hillman and Seneca and their own hard decades, and my part starts looking like the prompt rather than the point.
Thank you for reading me! :)
As you know, Tamara, the Sphinx is someone I love dearly and sometimes even more ...
She is the one who asks the questions ... these questions, here, that call for an answer ...
my guess to her riddle could only be... "a woman"
🦋💕
The Sphinx's original riddle had an answer that was also “human”, and it killed everyone who missed it. They went looking for something exotic when the answer was sitting in the chair.
Your version is the better question though. Oedipus answers “man” and walks away, riddle solved, done. Nobody has to live inside the answer afterwards. Answer “a woman” and you've bought the whole apparatus. What she survives, what she carries, what she isn't allowed to say out loud on the way through.
And the loving her more sometimes, I get that. The one who asks is more interesting than the one who answers. Answers close. Questions keep you company.
Thank you for this, André!
answers close … and questions open …
yes … after all that is what your beautiful poem does … n’est-ce pas ? my first comment was shallow … and reflects a bad day … J’en suis désolé, Tamara. et votre réponse toujours si généreuse … et juste !
Still, I can’t help reading it as a riddle … as the questioner provokes the reader and asks to be discovered … and she does it with these so strong and rebellious words … what she isn’t allowed to say ?
No apology needed. Bad days tend to produce the comments that go somewhere. The polished ones just applaud.
On the riddle, though, careful…. :) The Sphinx doesn't want to be discovered. She wants the right answer, which is a different appetite entirely. A riddle hoping to be solved is only a hint in costume. Hers had a body count.
People expect that not-allowed part to be scandalous, something buried. Usually it's the flattest thing on the shelf. “This hurt.” “I'm tired.” “I didn't want to.” Nobody forbids it, exactly. It just never gets invited, and after a while you stop offering. The poem shouts instead, and shouting is permitted. It's the small plain sentence that costs.
Merci, Tamara ... :)
No the Sphinx doesn't want to be discovered ... not completely so ... you are right ... Je ne crois pas qu'on veux être totalement compris ou découvert ... juste assez, oui ... mais il y aura toujours une part de mystère, d'ombre, de secret ...
I have a feeling that if one (Oedipus ? or just anyone) doesn't have the answer she seeks, then she doesn't really kill him, but her action then is that she disappears ... she just goes away, leaving him alone, disappointed and in tears, having missed the chance of really meeting that one amazing, magic and wonderful being. A sort of death actually ... a missing that will hurt a whole lifetime.
Dans mon univers ... le Sphinx n'est pas quelqu'un qui tue ... c'est une femme qui ne demande qu'une chose : d'être écoutée, comprise, prise par la main ... pour danser ... danser ... er rire.
That small plain sentence ... mon attention reste là ... la phrase si petite, si douce ... qui invite dans son silence à être prise par les bras, consolée, peut être, ou juste pour l'instant d'une tendresse ... 🦋💕
Careful with your version because it might be the crueller one. Killing at least grants a meeting. Disappearing means he never even knew what he failed. But here's the part of the myth people forget. When Oedipus answers correctly, she throws herself from the rock. She dies of being solved. Not of losing. So your instinct about the part left in shadow is in the story already, and it's structural, not decorative…. she exists only as long as something in her stays unanswered. Juste assez, oui, which makes the hand-taking harder than it sounds. To be understood enough to dance and not so much that there's nothing left standing there. Most people can't calibrate it. They either don't try or they solve you completely and wonder where you went.
Nobody's trained to just receive a plain thing without immediately fixing it. Merci, André!
Oui, elle se jette dans l’abime … c’est vrai. Ainsi elle « disparaît ». Sa mission est accomplie. C’est la version de Sophocle.
J’ai beaucoup lu sur le Sphinx … et je la vois très différente … Dans certaines versions moins connues du Mythe elle est la mère d’Œdipe ! Surprenant, je m’en rends bien compte !!! parfois, il me semble qu’elle est même immortelle !
C’est cette version que j’ai retenu pour mes pièces de théâtre … et celle qui se promène sans cesse dans ma tête… j’ai fait l’erreur d’oublier d’établir cette énorme différence dans ma réponse à vos commentaires … je vous dois des excuse (encore une fois … décidément !).
Cela dit, that small plain sentence continues to haunt my thoughts … c’est la part de mystère ?
Bonne soirée, Tamara, et merci à vous 🦋💕
There is the worst, which requires the standing in the face of it all. And the stiff board spine, rigid, unyielding, unbreakable. Wind and rain, thunder, lightning of life, the bitter trying to rip your soul, and tear you down.
And then the ember, the quiet ember coming to life after the thrashing, after the storm. “Unrelenting power”, gathered, learned from other worst times. “I can and will do this again and again” - resilience, yes. But something more, and I struggle to name it but I feel it. I believe it might be the balm of knowing and that knowing, for me, trumps all.
The thing you're struggling to name might be closer to a memory than a virtue? Resilience gets talked about like a muscle, something you have. What you describe sounds more like evidence. You've been here before, you came out, and the record exists whether or not you feel strong on any given morning. The balm isn't in the strength. It's in the file.
Which matters because feeling doesn't cooperate. Some days you have nothing. But the knowing sits underneath regardless of mood, and it isn't asking you to be brave, just to consult the record. Faith needs no proof. This has proof. That's why it holds when everything else has gone quiet.
Thank you for this, Kim! It made me think.
The problem is that you have never once performed the act of vindicare sibi — you have never claimed yourself back from the world's demands.
Is this applicable?
Seneca wrote “vindica te tibi” to Lucilius as an imperative, in the second person, about time… reclaim your hours before they are spent for you. You've swung it around into an infinitive and pointed it at a life you haven't lived. Different instrument.
My poem's whole business is title and ownership. “I was never its to own” is the claim being staked. So on the plain reading, no, it doesn't apply.
The sharper version of your point, though, is one someone else in this thread got to first, so I'll hand you the better weapon. Résistance still lets the storm write the agenda. Standing is a posture that needs something to push against, and a self defined by what it withstands is not quite a self reclaimed. That's fair! My poem stops at the standoff. I've said as much elsewhere here.
Where you overreach is “never once”. That's a verdict on my life, not a reading of 16 lines, and it's a rather grand thing to know about someone from a page.
Ok. Just asking without thinking. My error.
No, it’s not a mistake, I like to discuss about these things.
You are very gracious. My original comment was supposed to be in quotes as I got it somewhere else and then I was asking, only asking, if the quote could possibly Apply.
Wow, I’m in !!
Thank you so much!
This is timely for me. I won’t count myself among the few in the world who truly embody this, but I am among the living, and this reminds me of what it has taken to make it to forty, and what I should be aspiring towards to make it to whatever cause outside of my control ends me. I don’t mean to sound bleak—reading this took me far from bleakness, and immediately started fitting itself to music in my head, for what that’s worth. Thank you for this.
40 is a strange checkpoint. Nobody warns you that it arrives with an inventory attached. You just start noticing what things cost, retroactively, and the bill was always there, you'd just been too busy to read it.
The music thing isn't nothing, by the way. Say what for that's worth again and I'll fight you about it. The poem going straight to melody in your head means it bypassed the arguing part of you entirely and went somewhere older. That's the best result I could hope for and I can't engineer it. Only you can do that half.
And the bit about the cause outside your control, I'd leave that alone. Not bleak, just accurate! Everyone's ending arrives from somewhere they weren't looking. The aspiration is about what you carry when it shows up.
Thank you for this, Anthony!
"Say what for that's worth again and I'll fight you about it."
Yes, you got me, there! As I think about it, "for what that's worth" is probably a phrase best excised from the vocabulary of anyone who means to stand by whatever they say. I appreciate you calling me out on that.
The French version is worse: “je dis ça, je dis rien”. (I say this, I say nothing). Said constantly, usually right after saying something devastating, and it functions as a small legal shield. What it actually does is pre-discount the goods before anyone's offered a price. You've decided the sentence is worth less than it is, out loud, in advance, so that nobody else gets the pleasure.
Anyway, no fighting. I was being too much about a preposition.
Thanks for taking it in the spirit it was meant, which was affectionate!
I can hear someone saying, « Je dis ça, je dis rien » in a tone related to that with which someone might say, “An’ I tell ya for nuthin’…” (although context can completely change the meaning behind that one.)
There is a proverb, and you’re probably familiar with it, that says, “Blows from a friend can be trusted.” Our exchanges have given me plenty of reason to trust the playful affection behind your combat, and the good intention behind your criticism, so no worries!
“Je dis ça, je dis rien” is the perfect find because it does something English can't manage. It launches the missile and disclaims ownership in the same breath, and everyone knows exactly what happened, and there's no comeback. The Cockney version has more sincerity in it, oddly. It's offering the thing for free. The French one is pure deniability with a shrug bolted on.
The proverb is Proverbs 27:6, and the second half is the interesting part, the one nobody quotes. Something about an enemy's kisses being profuse. So the whole thing is a comparison, not a compliment. Faithful wounds versus multiplied kisses. It's telling you the affection is the tell, not the blow.
But you've read the exchange right, and I'd rather be argued with by someone who thinks I'm worth the trouble :)
When punctuation embodies true senses, when words are created to make sense of life rather than giving birth to it; when meaning emerges in the colours of the earth and the heartbeats of the wild. I ADORE!
The punctuation point deserves more credit than it gets. In a poem the commas are breath marks. Where I put a full stop is where I'm telling you to stop breathing for a second. That's the closest thing writing has to physically reaching into someone. And thank you from the bottom of my heart, Otilia!
The world can burn you or build you into being indomitable. Thanks for the reminder, Tamara.💖
Or it does both, in that order, and you don't get to know which one you're in while it's happening. The burning doesn't scream it is construction. Thank you for reading me, Paulina!
eu não vou cair
Not falling is the whole poem. Everything else is decoration. Thank you for reading me, Lorenzo!
Reminded me of Maria Popova's beautiful line: 'We use poetry to give the truth meaning.'
That line pairs oddly well with the usual definition people carry, which is closer to poetry decorating the truth, dressing a plain fact up so it goes down easier. Popova's claim is bigger. The truth arrives inert. Facts don't come with their own significance attached, they just sit there being the case. Meaning is the thing we add, and poetry is one of the few tools built specifically for the adding, putting poets in a slightly uncomfortable spot if you follow it out. It means the meaning isn't discovered, sitting in the truth waiting to be found. It's conferred. We hand it over. And that's a real responsibility because you can give a truth the wrong meaning just as easily as the right one, and a good enough poem will make the wrong one feel inevitable. Popova trusts the instrument. Most days I do too. But it cuts both directions, and I think she'd agree the blade doesn't care which way you swing it.
Beautifully put, especially the last line. I do wonder about 'truth arrives inert,' though. That feels like the philosophical hinge. I find myself thinking poetry reveals or deepens meaning more than it confers it.
Your distinction is the better one, and I think you are right to correct the verb. “Confer” suggests poetry hands meaning over from outside, like a title bestowed, when what actually happens is nearer to what you say, a revealing, a deepening of something that was already latent in the thing itself. The poem does not add the meaning. It clears the ground so the meaning already present can finally be seen. Less a gift, more an excavation.
Though I would hold one small corner for “confer”, in this narrow sense… sometimes the revealing is so transformative that the line between uncovering and creating genuinely blurs. When a poem shows you a grief you did not know you carried, was that revealed or made? I cannot always tell. Perhaps that undecidability is the hinge, not either verb alone.
Thank you for catching the inert bit and pressing on it, Samir! You have found the seam I was not sure held.
I had an interesting exchange about this with Adam Knight who restacked my poem.
https://substack.com/@delir1um/note/c-294053614?r=2ug7wg&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Illuminating. 'Stand close enough to sense the heat coming off it' is a beautiful image. Thank you for sharing the exchange.