Cliffs by Sandra Lim

Cliffs
Sandra Lim

Words are afraid up here.

The rapture and the terrifying exposure.

Strange birds roosting, a human voice shouting a world’s-end
     shout.

Snow hurries to the meeting, wanting to cover the waking in my
     body.

I could fill up the sea with this waking.

The outlook is thrilling; it satisfies.

It goes even further than the view from the heights of love.

It eats the roof off the sky.

MARGINALIA

1.
Day 21 of The Sealey Challenge. Today’s offering is The Wilderness: Poems by Sandra Lim.

2.
What does it mean to survive in a world that is constantly shifting beneath our feet? How do we navigate a landscape where the familiar can suddenly become strange, and certainty is always out of reach? The wilderness that the poet writes about in this book is not just a place—it’s a way of seeing and acknowledging life’s landscape and how it can have both its beauty and brutality.

3.
It is also a metaphor for the untamed parts of ourselves that resist easy categorisation. It’s the space where we confront the unvarnished truth of our existence, where we are forced to reckon with the reality that nothing is permanent and that everything is subject to change, decay, and renewal.

4.
There’s a philosophical undercurrent to the poet’s work—she writes about the natural world, but her true subject is often the human condition—the way we move through life, the ways we are shaped by our surroundings, and the ways we resist that shaping. In the wilderness, we are reminded that we are both a part of the world and, apart from it, that we are constantly creating and recreating ourselves in response to forces beyond our control.

5.
Is the wilderness something to be feared or embraced? Is it a place of exile or of discovery? The poet leaves a task for us—to find our own way through the tangled undergrowth of our thoughts and emotions. The wilderness, after all, is where we come face to face with our own vulnerability, where we learn what it means to be truly alive.