Violin By Sheila Black

• Khoda Madrajat, Grade 11
• Poetry
• 2021

You must use the body - its curves,
its hollows, the spring of the sound, which
brings back what is absent, what has
been and is now gone, fading. Cat-gut,
fret, the busy machinery of longing,
which takes its strength from the
presence of absence, the body's darkness,
the wood carved out, thinned and
made to flex. There is a pain at the
source of it - so easily broken, this tree
without a heart, the sap dried to amber
patina. Only in the sound can you
hear it move, the veins in the blood of
the body that is no more. The bow pulled
along the taut strings, a pitch that
is all but unbearable.