Written, once again, for the edX Art of Poetry course I'm doing. This week we gathered seven poems that mean something to us and wrote about them. It was a wonderful experience--a lot of work for one sitting but to see how they all folded together was a blessing.
- Sugarskulli: “Ode to Boyhood” (USA)
- Eileen Kernaghan: “Mohenjo-daro: a poem” (Canada)
- Seamus Heaney: “A Sofa in the the Forties” (Ireland)
- Julian of Norwich: “I it am” (England)
- Togiram (Emile Célestin-Mégie): “M’ap Ekri Youn
Powèm/I’m Writing a Poem” (Haiti)
- Thich Nhat Hanh : “Please Call Me By My True Names”
(Vietnam)
- Mirabai: “The Plums Tasted” (India)
Sugarskulli is Alex Barr (b. 1998, USA), a
sixteen-year-old transgendered girl. She says she’s not a poet, but “Ode to
Boyhood” shook me as good poetry can when it strikes a personal chord.
She tells about
a girl who’s a boy inside, and the clash with family expectations, fellow
students, self.
A pink dress,
hanging in the/
closet with/
chains in the
pearl necklace./
Weight /
Weight, and
the color of shame./
Cement/
blocks in the
shape of high heeled shoes,/
a mother who
makes too many tomboy jokes./
“That’s my
girl,” she says “You’re just like your/
dad.” The role
of the daughter never fit./
More than just
clothes are in that closet.
Recently, a young man I know (now a young woman I know) dove into self-harm,
shutting inward, grief. In my youth, I rejected the stereotypes of girlhood—if
this was what we were allowed, I wanted out. Then later, the uneasy awareness
that though men are cute—so are women. Say that
out loud in 1970? Puhleeze.
I could write
yards about this, but I won’t, only that Sugarskulli’s pain hits close to home.
Her last stanza is one line:
Dysphoria is
the ugliest poet.
Eileen
Kernaghan’s (b.1939, Canada) “Mohenjo-daro” introduces her beautifully written
novel about the Indus Valley, Winter on
the Plain of Ghosts. I find Kernaghan’s writing absolutely magical, whether
in prose or poem; here I’m swept off to a long-dead yet vibrantly once-living
place.
The salt
earth is bleached/
and brittle
as old bone, in winter/
on the plain
of ghosts./
Shrill and
thin down the grey/
millennia,
the spirit voices/
cry on the
parched wind.
This sort of
writing takes me to my childhood when I was just discovering the awesomeness of
ancient history. It was utterly news to me that there were whens that were not
now; I shook with excitement to reach out with my mind and touch anything from
the mighty “microbe hunters” (van Leeuwenhoek, Madame Curie, etc.) to the knights
of the Round Table to the massive-bodied dinosaurs that once roared above the
land. In those days I didn’t need excellent writing to propel my imaginings, to
bring me right there, but nowadays I’m more jaded. Without fail, Kernaghan is
able to get me there. This poem led into the novel, and it, too, transported
me, with great shivers of delight, to another place and time.
Seamus
Heaney’s (1939–2013, Ireland) “A Sofa in the the Forties” delights me! I can’t
read it too often. Childhood’s a blank in many ways until something like this
hurls me back into the funnest bits of it. Like Heaney, we had little TV, one
channel—hardly watched, mostly dull stuff for adults—like him we had low class
talk, not like the proper-speaking newsmen of the day. The rabbit ears were always
falling over, the roof antenna blowing out of kilter by the wind, the images remote
from our lives. But ah, the games of imagination! The chesterfield—not a sofa to
us—was indeed a magic carpet on which we flew to different realms, or to this
realm, writ large, ourselves as the central figures for a change. A train? Yes,
even a train. Or a wagon train. Or a fishing boat. Or a horse.
Out in front,
on the big upholstered arm,/
Somebody
craned to the side, driver or/
Fireman,
wiping his dry brow with the air/
Of one who
had run the gauntlet.../
Like unlit
carriages through fields at night,/
Our only job
to sit, eyes straight ahead,/
And be
transported and make engine noise.
Julian of
Norwich (1342 – 1416, England): “I it am”. Wow—if only I had seen this as a child! (Devout
as I was.)
I it am./
The greatness and goodness of the Father,/
I it am;/
the wisdom and kindness of the Mother,/
I it am.
The greatness and goodness of the Father,/
I it am;/
the wisdom and kindness of the Mother,/
I it am.
Male God is “great”
and female God is “kind”: I get that this is still stereotyping and harmful. But
that there was admitted to BE a female side of God—what a revelation! That the
female and male were not God and his mum, who gets none of the good lines and
acts a tad too holyholy for young me, but two clearly equal quantities—what an
antidote to the institutional and ubitquitous sexism that strangled me at every
step. And both sides of God are me! There is even a mysterious neuter
side “I it am” to reflect on.
I am grateful
that as a young adult I did discover Goddess, and could begin to reconstruct my
relationship to Divine, to self, to world. But imagine if I had known that centuries before my birth there was a
deeply spiritual, brilliantly creative, Christian
nun and mystic who saw God in this way...
Togiram (Emile
Célestin-Mégie, Haiti) (b. 1922): “M’ap Ekri Youn Powèm/I’m Writing a Poem”.
Togiram has
struggled long to have Creole recognized as the main Haitian language—beginning
at a time when it was considered worthless, and educated Haitians spoke only French.
Not surprising, then, his vigorous sympathy with the poor and maltreated people
of Haiti and all the world.
I’m writing a
poem/
For the guy
too poor to be able to have a woman/
For the woman
without a husband without any other support.../
For the
people who are homeless who sleep in doorways.../
I’m writing a
poem that can never end./
Togiram’s
sentiments cut deeply for me. I have lived in Haiti, befriended children
sleeping on the pier, but I have also been a child powerless to feed or protect myself. I grew up feeling like a person outside
the center of society, unwanted, yet I had humanity, too, I had wishes and
talents and dreams. I also longed for respect from the world for my people and me,
and to cultivate those feelings and capacities in myself.
Apologies. The
only version I can find is me reading “Powèm”, in both languages:
“Please Call
Me By My True Names” by Thich Nhat Hanh (1926, Vietnam)—it’s difficult to express
this poem’s immensity. It’s simple, beautiful:
every second
I am arriving/
to be a bud
on a Spring branch,/
to be a tiny
bird, with still-fragile wings
We learn
deeply of our interconnectedness with all things, but not only the lovely.
I am the
twelve-year-old girl,/
refugee on a
small boat,/
who throws
herself into the ocean/
after being
raped by a sea pirate./
And I am the
pirate,/
my heart not
yet capable/
of seeing and
loving./
My joy is
like Spring, so warm/
it makes
flowers bloom all over the Earth./
My pain is
like a river of tears,/
so vast it
fills the four oceans./
I’ve long
felt keenly this connection to living things, and burn with anguish when I see
an insect deliberately squashed or a child humiliated. I also keenly feel my
own violence, my own withholding, the knife’s edge between who I’ve become and
who I might have become. I’ve suffered deeply, but with Thay’s poem I’m
liberated to soar as well, to claim all that I am, all that we are, take
action, and rejoice.
Mirabai’s (1498-1557,
India) “The Plums Tasted” in a way enfolds all of the previous poems into one
rapturous exhalation. Mira speaks of the dirty, uneducated, low-caste girl who
has the audacity to suck the plums in such an ill-mannered way. But the god is
not deflected by manners and appearances. He sweeps her to heaven to live in
ecstasy with him because, of them all, she
knows how to “practice rapture like that”. “She knew how to love.”
Although I
didn’t plan this, the sweep of my anthology is to shake us awake to what is
truly relevant to living wholly alive in this short, exquisite life, to cast aside
the mental shackles that allow us to force one child into shame and another
into entitlement, to free ourselves from the programming that keeps us half
alive and collusive with the oppression of our souls and our world.
She was
ungainly, low-caste, ill mannered and dirty,/
but the god took the fruit she’d been sucking./
but the god took the fruit she’d been sucking./
Why? She knew
how to love.
...
The Lord of
Fallen Fools.../
will save anyone who can practice rapture like that—/
I myself in a previous birth/
was a cowherding girl/
at Gokul.
will save anyone who can practice rapture like that—/
I myself in a previous birth/
was a cowherding girl/
at Gokul.
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