The Future Is Rare

I was emailing local poet and philosopher Karen Houle today, and it reminded me of the Thought || Language || Poetry pieces that I’ve mostly been leaving aside recently. In the course of our conversation she mentioned Maurice Blanchot, and I just happened to have something based on a passage from his A Voice From Elsewhere. So here it is.

The Future Is Rare

The future is rare,
and every day that comes
is not a day that begins.

Even rarer are words
that, in their silence,
are the reserve of words
yet to come, that turn us,
even near the end,
toward the force
of the beginning.