Thommo, Hemjit
Eight of us met for a
session of poetry and we had a guest, Martin Enckell, a poet from
Finland who was spending time in India. Priya met him for an
interview and invited him to join.
Priya, Preeti
The Dropbox is gaining
ground as a way of sharing poems so everybody has an electronic copy
before the session. In case anyone is having a problem, please send
the links to the poems, if not, just the titles of the poems and the
poet name to Joe and he will try to scare up the poems from somewhere
and put them in the folders of the KRG Dropbox.
Martin Enckell, Pamela, KumKum, Priya
We had some all-time
favourite poets like Vikram Seth, and some lesser known performance
poets who are making the current scene in England and elsewhere. Amid
them we had a novelist and a playwright trying their hand at poetry.
Zakia, Pamela
Poetry gives us a wide
sampling of writers and enables us to enjoy at a single session the
cultural contributions of a diverse group. Invariably, in coming to
grips with new writers there is a difficulty but the readers advance
ideas to clarify points, and others come up with alternate
interpretations. Poetry with its characteristic requirement that the
sound and the sense amplify each other, offers an open field for the
human voice.
Martin Enckell, Pamela, KumKum
We heard from one of our
old readers, Ankush Banerjee, that he is back in town and may put in
an appearance soon. Old readers are welcome to drop in if they are in
town. We miss them all.
KumKum, Pamela, Priya, Thommo, Preeti, Martin Enckell, Joe, Hemjit (seated)
Full Account and Record
of the Poetry Session on Feb 10, 2017
The dates for the next
readings are confirmed as follows:
Fri
Mar 10, 2017, 5:30 pm – Americanah by Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie
Present: Zakia,
Thommo, Hemjit, Pamela, KumKum, Priya, Joe, Preeti
Absent: Shoba,
Saras, Sunil, Kavita
Guest: Martin
Enckell
1.
Zakia
Jordan Zandi is the author of Solarium, named by both The New Yorker and The New York Times as one of the best poetry books of the year
According to a blurb from
his publisher, Sarabande Books, Jordan Zandi grew up in the rural
Midwest, and in 2011 graduated with an MFA in poetry from Boston
University, where he was the recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global
Fellowship to Bolivia. His poetry has appeared in The New Republic
and Little Star. Henri Cole, the critic said “Solarium
is a completely original gem of a book ... there is a sweet spirit
haunting his guileless poems.” The New Yorker commended the
weirdness and clarity of Zandi’s mind as revealed in his debut
collection, Solarium. The Publishers Weekly noted:
“Like Wallace Stevens, Zandi delights in riddles, anecdotes,
and mysterious landscapes; his colorful scenes suggest more than they
explain.”
The title poem from his
collection which Zakia read is a medley of recollections from his
midwestern upbringing on the open prairie. There's a coyote sinking
its teeth into a haunch of meat, the sun rising amid the roses, a
train crawling over the lonely distance, a mouse as a pet, eating
quinces, and wishing his heart was as big as the world. Is the poet
trying to make sense of the past? The essential thing is whether in
the process he carries along his reader. I agree with the NY Times
that sometimes Zandi's lines are deliberately goofy, but in a funny
way you like to continue reading them.
2.
Thommo
Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Jonathan Livingston
Seagull, written by Richard Bach, is a fable in novella form
about a seagull learning about life and flight, and a homily about
self-perfection. Richard Bach wrote the book as the life of a
seagull, who graduates from ordinary life to a higher plane. This
seagull makes friends with another wise seagull who teaches him to
move into new worlds. He returns to Earth to teach his discovery and
spread the love of flight. The book became a best seller and Bach
wrote many other books that had a wide circulation. Seagull
was made into a movie.
Bach also wrote Messiah's
Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul, which was mentioned by
someone.
A poet by the name of
Eberhart took up the story and cast it into sonnets, 15 altogether.
Thommo chose Nos. 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7 to recite. Joe asked if the
philosophy behind the poem was a little vague, in the manner of
Kahlil Gibran. Thommo pointed to Nos. 14 and 15 as providing the
answer:
The flock had cast him
out and set him free.
his freedom took him to
a higher realm
where nothing lay beyond reality,
Pamela thought the poet is
child-like.
3.
Hemjit
John Donne, portrait as a young man
John Donne was an English
poet and priest in the Church of England. He is a metaphysical poet,
but has a strong vein of sensual charge in his writing. Among his
most famous lines are these taken from Divine Meditations 14:
Batter my heart,
three-personed God; for, you
As yet but knock,
breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and
stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break,
blow, burn, and make me new.
In Holy Sonnets 17 he
turns the death of his wife into a resolution for his life:
Since she whom I loved
hath paid her last debt
To nature, and to hers,
and my good is dead,
And her soul early into
heaven ravished,
Wholly in heavenly
things my mind is set.
Donne is famous for his
incantation in the Divine Meditations 17:
No man is an island,
entire of itself;
every man is a piece of
the continent,
a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away
by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a
promontory were.
as well as if a manor of
thy friend’s
or of thine own were.
Any man’s death
diminishes me,
because I am involved in
mankind;
and therefore never send
to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.
Donne did not want to take
Holy Orders, but James I commanded him to and he became Dean of St
Paul's Cathedral in London in 1621 and held the position until his
death. He had a reputation as an eloquent preacher and fully 160 of
his sermons survive.
He married Anne More and
got thrown in prison because her father didn't approve but he was
released, and had 12 children by her. He was frequently hard up. He
wrote plenty of erotic poetry, a fulsome example of which is To
His Mistress Going to Bed.
Donne's suggestive poetry
has sparked many limericks such as this one:
There once was a poet
called Donne
Who said 'Piss off!' to
the sunne:
The sunne said 'Jack
Get out of the sack,
The girl that your'e
with is a nun.'
The ‘canonisation’ of
the poem's title is canonisation for love:
And by these hymns, all
shall approve
Us canonized
for Love.
Joe noted that 11 or 12
children meant there was no impediment to love in Donne's case.
Hemjit added a correction that Donne wrote this poem before he
was married.
4.
Martin Enckell
Martin Enckell
Martin Enckell, our guest,
invited by Priya to meet our group also decided to recite one of his
poems which has been translated into numerous languages from the
Swedish original. It is called Saint Petersburg, the capital
of Russia (and of Finland) until 1917 and the Revolution. Peter the
Great started building it in the 17th century. Helsinki is only a
3-hour train ride from Saint Petersburg, a beautiful city that during
WWII (known as the Great Patriotic War in that part of the world)
became the victim of a cruel siege by the Wehrmacht forces of Nazi
Germany lasting 872 days with the loss of 1m civilian lives. Its
architecture features many lovely buildings
– cathedrals, museums, stadiums, stations, palaces, the Marinsky
ballet theatre, the Hermitage
- the largest museum in the world - and of course the Neva River.
The city was a cradle of Russian culture.
The poem has powerful
images of death facing death. It's a homage to Saint Petersburg and
the women who kept life going.
Anna Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian
poet, wrote a series of poems called The Requiem; it is is
introduced by a paragraph that briefly states how she was selected to
describe the months of waiting outside Leningrad Prison, along with
many other women, for just a glimpse of fathers, brothers or sons who
had been taken away by the secret police in Russia. Her own son was
among those arrested by the police in 1938. One of the remarkable
facts about poetry (which flourished in Russia, in spite of the
terror of the secret police) was that Akhmatova and others memorised
everything and kept it in their heads and passed it on to others
orally, and it was only in 1963, for example, that a copy of the
Requiem was published in Munich; but in Russia only in 1987.
Osip Mandelshtam
The poet Osip Mandelshtam
once remarked prophetically: "Poetry is respected only in this
country—people are killed for it." He himself met his death as
punishment for his poem on the subject of Stalin, never written down
but recited to a number of friends, one of whom betrayed him.
The darkness in the poem
does not have to do with winter, but with the history. KumKum
remarked that the poem is shot through with pain, the pain of
the entire 20th century. Zakia felt the poem makes you feel that the
pain is still ongoing.
Martin said he returned to
Saint Petersburg often. Kolkata reminded him in some ways of SP
because of the old palaces, now decaying. He mentioned that in the
Russian Orthodox Church the Mother of God is always in the centre.
Martin thought Kali (on which subject he has written another poem)
represents that figure, but KumKum said, Kali is not the mother
principle in the Hindu pantheon, perhaps Durga is.
5.
Pamela
Vikram Seth in Oxfordshire
Vikram Seth, a favourite
poet of Pamela, was once again her choice with two poems, titled
Mistaken, and A Style of Loving. The first poem shows
how VS can make a poem from so slight an event as a passing glance in
a library. One interpretation is that it was a gender preference
confusion at work in this poem. This was in his California days which
seem to have transpired in a state of bisexuality. The poet genuinely
mistook the other person for someone he knew; she loved him thinking
he was ready to return love.
The second poem is more
eloquent and touching, the exchange of friendship for love, a bargain
that is the subject of a recent film by Karan Johar called Ae Dil
Hai Mushkil. Is it to be dosti or aashiki?
Were we to become lovers
Where would our best
friends be?
From there the discussion
moved to the public stance VS has taken (he is a private person,
otherwise) against the Supreme Court's decision when it refused to
support the Delhi High Court's reading down of Section 377 of the
Indian Penal Code which criminalises gay sex, among other things. The
famous India
Today cover embodies his courageous stand, ‘Not A Criminal.’
Later an NGO field a
petition seeking a review of the apex court's judgement in December
2013 that had struck down an earlier Delhi High Court decision
de-criminalising gay sex. VS happened to be attending the Kolkata
Literary Meet 2014 when the decision was announced that the review
petition had been rejected by the justices and unnatural sex
reaffirmed as abhorrent. The next morning he distributed hundreds of
copies a poem he had written, and asked it to be distributed free of
copyright:
Through love's great
power
Through love's great
power to be made whole
In mind and body, heart
and soul –
Through freedom to find
joy, or be
By dint of joy itself
set free
In love and in
companionhood:
This is the true and
natural good.
To undo justice, and to
seek
To quash the rights that
guard the weak –
To sneer at love, and
wrench apart
The bonds of body, mind
and heart
With specious reason and
no rhyme:
This is the true
unnatural crime.
Everybody stood and clapped
when VS finished reading it!
6.
KumKum
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was
an American poet who lived from 1883 to 1963. He was a successful
medical doctor, practicing in New Jersey, USA. His father was an
Englishman, and mother a Puerto Rican. Williams wrote his first poem
when very young. He relished the excitement of writing poems, yet he
remained a part-time poet all his life. It was his interest and
devotion to medicine that took priority.
Williams' favourite poets
were: Keats, for his mastery with words, elegance, rhymes and perfect
metre. And, Walt Whitman, for his free verse, which offered Williams
"an impulse toward freedom and release of the self."
Williams met Ezra Pound at
the University of Pennsylvania, and after that he could not ever
shrug off Pound's influence on his poetic journey.
KumKum chose several poems
of Williams and recited four which she considered his best, Pastoral,
The Farmer, The Right of Way, and The Horse. The
last poem has the striking metaphor of a car for the horse on a cold
day:
blowing
fog from
his nostrils
like fumes from
the twin
exhausts of a car
Poets write about little
things of no ‘vast import to the nation.’ So Williams in Pastoral
surveys the derelict houses of the poor on backstreets and makes a
catalogue of the derelictions:
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire,
ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
Priya liked his attention
to the small things. KumKum said Williams was a very good doctor, a
paediatrician making house calls.. He was also well-known as a poet.
7.
Priya
Priya chose two poets to
expose, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Bertolt Brecht. The first is
better known as a novelist and the second as a playwright.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1994
There is nothing like
prison to concentrate the mind and gain an appreciation of the
essential things that make life worth living, in Solzhenitsyn's case,
‘the freedom to breathe freely.’ The man who spent eight years in
a Gulag forced labour camp (for writing derogatory comments in a
private letter about the conduct of the war in which he was a
decorated soldier) concludes:
As long as there is
fresh air to breathe
under an apple tree
after a shower,
we may survive a little
longer.
Priya was introduced to
these writers by a Slovenian artist (?). Solzhenitsyn wrote famous
works like The Gulag Archipelago, The Cancer Ward
and The First Circle; Thommo said like most Russian authors he
is a bit tedious (is that true of Nabokov and Pushkin?).
Solzhenitsyn was a prickly temporary migrant to the West and when
invited to deliver a convocation
speech to Harvard in 1978 he said:
But the [West's] persisting
blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the
vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of
contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most
attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but
temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by
their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western
pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life.
Fortunately for the West he
returned to Russia and has not been heard from since.
Bertolt Brecht
The second poem of Priya's
by Brecht is also about exile, and asserts its transient nature. The
migrant will soon go back, for
The wall that keeps you
out is crumbling too,
As fast or faster.
We are in a period of
anxiety about migrants and walls with happenings in USA and UK. But
aren't we all migrants? Perhaps, this little cartoon by Peter Brookes
of the London Times may help to ally fears:
8.
Joe
Meena Kandasamay, dalit & feminist poet
Ms Kandasamy is a poet from
Chennai, who identifies strongly as a dalit and a feminist. She has
written a novel, Gypsy Goddess, and 3 books of poetry and has
published her poems and performed at literary festivals worldwide.
Her parents are teachers and she grew up going to a Kendriya
Vidyalaya. She mentions the school taught only English and Hindi; her
loss of native Tamil writing was a significant handicap, which she
made up for by self-study and since then she has translated numerous
Tamil poets. She is proud of her Tamil roots and the language,
particularly its resistance to Sanskritisation. The only thing she
regrets about Tamil is that it gave the word for outcasts to the
English language: pariah. She was an academic herself in
Chennai, and took a PhD, but decided to give up teaching and make
writing her full-time occupation, precarious as it is for one who is
primarily a poet.
For a while she was editor
of a Dalit magazine. She has written at length on the subjugation of
women by upper castes, and the terrorising of dalits that still goes
on in rural areas and whenever there is a rumour or real event in
which a Dalit tries to have a relation with an upper-caste person.
She has written with deep insight and very analytically about the
Hindutva movement and its casteist agenda, it patriarchy, its moral
policing, and its role in keeping dalits in their place. However she
says, “The struggle to annihilate caste will be victorious, and it
will owe a great deal to the Dalit people and their relentless
struggle.”
Ankush Bannerjee recited
some poems by her in June 2014 at KRG. The first poem, Lines
addressed to a warrior, begin with an ambiguous invitation:
come.
colonise me.
There is an erotic
undercurrent as she continues:
invade.
this inner-space.
...
capture.
every territory.
The territory she talks of
teasingly is made clear in her last line. She dedicated Lines
addressed to a warrior to the men of Durban who made passes
at her wherever she went when she attended Poetry Meet Africa, 2010.
Mulligatawny Dreams,
the second poem, speaks of her love of English but her longing is for another kind of english which has shed its colonial cast and
assumed the simplicity of the East. Vain thought but it makes for a
lively poem.
9.
Preeti
Yrsa Daley-Ward
Preeti chose a spoken word
poet (meaning she performs as well as writes poetry), Yrsa
(pronounced yersah) Daley-Ward. She is a writer born in England to a
Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father. Yrsa was raised by her devout
Seventh Day Adventist grandparents in the small town of Chorley in
the North of England. Her first collection of stories On Snakes
and Other Stories was published by 3:AM Press. Bone is the
title of her new book.
You can hear her recite the
first poem, True Story, by skipping to 6:52 min at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAZEWdb_vMg
She says she went to a
poetry workshop when she was in South Africa to work as a model in
Capetown, and they set a homework on writing about discord in the
home. She thought to herself, “God, I can do that.” And True
Story was the outcome.
Here’s an interview with
her:
She is also an actress and
her IMDB page is at
Preeti recited a second
poem by Yrsa titled Scent. The poet is having trouble
forgetting a lover even after three years, and says ‘I
can't undo the problem of your scent.’ The refrain is repeated at
the end:
three
years
and
I can’t clean you off my skin.
Readings
1.
Zakia
Jordan Zandi (born
?, MFA in Poetry from Boston University in 2011)
Solarium
1
And
daybreak! The sun
sitting up—
Oh God
I thought I
saw God spread out
in the roses
again—
Momentarily,
I will be taken up
like flame in a cloud like
a cinder in fire
to
outflap the empyrean—
Dead things gumming the
sidewalk.
Hello,
dead
things.
Tell me: What good is a
life that wears away?
2
I chew the red wire,
then
the blue wire.
Then through the flowered
wallpaper—
Oh! Look at this charming
table:
already set; built for a
mouse;
and silent as a banquet
hall
after the guests have gone.
3
I was a dead thing once.
On the back porch once—
facing the
square
of my mother’s rose-
garden, with
the northfacing windows
full-opened in June, and
other flowers,
the names
I’ve forgotten, all gone
into bloom,
I’ve heard
the train horn bawl out again
from across the river,
first sound
I remember,
tolled
thru the walls of an empty
house,
have watched the coyotes
come loping
over across these
frost-flocked rows of the field—
4
‘Quick—to the window,
Mother
come see—the coyote
he’s dragging a haunch by
the bone.’
He’ll lay it down, lie
down
beside it, then sink
his teeth in the flitch.
5
The dream is big, the dream
is fancy:
The dream is big and fancy.
The rodent: cuddly; but a
little dirty.
I’ll keep him as a pet,
I’ll pet him like
a luck-charm—
6
Remember summer, Jordan?
Eating quinces, spitting
the seeds?
And how you never ate
quinces again
when they laughed when you
called them quinces?
And now there are no more
quinces?
I do remember quinces.
7
Beautiful ones—I see you
everywhere.
Hiding inside yourselves
8
Sometimes time is iron.
Swing it hard
hear it whoosh.
9
At the door, the red
curtain is still flapping.
Who will go in?
The one who is going
is going.
No, I do not die here.
The year is wrong.
Earth returns
and today no cloud cover.
I wish my heart was as big
as the world,
but bigger—
10
The sun sitting up
ever so
slowly—
July 16, 2013
2.
Thommo
Lawrence Eberhart (born
June 23, 1936)
Jonathon Livingston
Seagull - A Poem (A Heroic Crown of Sonnets)
1. The Breakfast
Flock
To fly was so much more than flapping wings
and while
the Breakfast Flock besieged the fleet
that chummed the water,
Jonathon had things
to do besides a squawking fight to eat.
The
thousand gulls began another day,
their raucous screeching
testimony to
their group-think need to aggregate that way,
for
they could see no other thing to do.
Yet Jonathon would so much
rather fly.
He lived to fly while others flew to eat.
He flew a
hundred feet into the sky
and practiced learning a new turning
feat.
A disgrace others would not take so well,
So tight a curve
he tried, he stalled and fell.
2. Level Flight
So
tight a curve he tried, he stalled and fell.
But unashamed, (though
seagulls never stall),
he stretched his wings and tried again- as
well
you note: he was not common after all.
He found thaf when
less than a half wingspan
above the water he could float on
air,
effortlessly, a most efficient plan
that let him glide most
far without a care.
But others cared! His dad and mother
asked"
"Why Jon, can't you just do like all the rest
and
leave low flying to the birds so tasked-
the pelicans who surely do
that best?"
"Be like others, avoid the social
stings
"Conform", they said, try doing seagull things.
3. Being
Obedient
"Conform", they said, try doing seagull
things.
He really tried for several days that week.
He tried to
wear his mother's apron strings;
he screeched and dove and fought
with wing and beak.
He flocked around the piers and fishing
boats
and dove for scraps of fish and tossed out bread.
He
chaffed against the boredom that promotes.
At last he simply let go
of his fish,
an old and hungry chasing gull was pleased.
To learn
to fly was Jonathon's real wish
and now the opportunity was
seized.
I'll not conform to nonsense they compel-
I'll study
flight and soon I will excel.
4. Fixed Wing
Flight
I'll study flight and soon I will excel
Alone, way out
to sea again, his need
to learn was something not to quench or
quell;
this week his goal was working on his speed.
He learned
why gulls don't make such speedy dives;
at seventy, the wings
become unstable
the upstroke fails regardless how one strives;
that
upstroke used by gulls was off the table
So Jon decided trying
something man
had used, a fixed-wing for his fast descent.
'Til
fifty MPH he flapped and then
his wings he held quite rigid, but
still bent.
Two thousand feet he plunged in that great fall.
He
broke the gull speed record after all.
5. Speed Record
He
broke the gull speed record after all.
exceeding ninety MPH- then
crashed.
He dreamed while knocked unconscious by his fall
and
sought to solve that problem, unabashed.
He woke with wings like
ragged bars of lead
but weight of failure yet loomed even worse.
He
wished he'd simply sink and end up dead,
for failures seemed his
own repeated curse.
But sinking low he heard a voice within
"I'm
limited by nature, am I not?
If meant for speed I'd have wings
short and thin-
like falcons and would not have to be taught."
He'd
join the flock, and once again act right.
By accident he flew
toward home at night.
6. Epiphany
By
accident he flew toward home at night;
"It's dark!", an
inner voice intoned, get down!-
for gulls you know will never find
this right."
"If you were meant to fly at night you
clown,
an owls night eyes and you'd have charts for brains
and
the short wings of falcons… short wings- wait."
The answer
pushed a rushing through his veins,
short wings have been the
missing needed trait.
So, now he rose two thousand feet
above-
"I'll fold my wings and fly on tips alone."
No
thought of death- pursuing what he loved
he "knew" that
he'd just found his new speed zone.
Re-born, rejoiced, he leaves
behind banal,
he left Flock-thought for inspiration's call.
7. 200 MPH
he
left Flock-thought for inspiration's call.
He dove, his wings now
clamped against his side
it was as if some laws he would annul.
At
such amazing speed it was a ride.
The faintest twitch of wingtips
promptly eased
him from his dive, and shot him over waves-
a
cannonball of grey- and he was pleased;
His vows abandoned for the
life he craves,
now practice was required and sun-up found
him
some five thousand feet above the fleet
about to dive again and to
astound.
He did just that in manner not so neat.
He'd learned to
speed but hadn't planned it right;
he just missed hitting flock of
gulls in flight.
8. Banished
He
just missed hitting flock of gulls in flight,
but learned that day
to turn at speed, the loop,
the roll, the pinwheel, too to his
delight!
the Council came together as a group
and shamed him for
his acts! He was cast out.
The days beyond, he found himself
alone
but that was not what sorrow was about,
it was their
missing what they might have known.
The flock refused the glory
learning brought.
They would keep scrabbling after chopped fish
heads
while delicious fresh fish were easily caught
by
streamlined dives beneath the waves instead.
Then Jon saw how good
life could really be,
The flock had cast him out and set him free.
9. Years later
The
flock had cast him out and set him free.
Two gulls as pure as
starlight flew beside
him friendly, smiling; their wings couldn't
be
an inch from his wingtips on either side.
He tested them. One
knot above stall speed,
then dives, slow rolls, and loops; they
matched each move.
They passed completely every test indeed
"We're
brothers came their words so strong and smooth.
"We've come to
take you home for you have learned.
One school is finished- yet
another waits."
At last he said "Let's go, and up he
turned
with gulls he thought were heaven's delegates.
He'd spend
his time at mental freedom's helm;
his freedom took him to a higher
realm.
10. The Elder
His
freedom took him to a higher realm.
The same old Jonathon looked
through his eyes,
but form had changed enough to
overwhelm.
Seagulls here all seemed satisfied and
wise.
"Chiang…",(said to one soon to leave this
world),
"this isn't heaven after all is it?"
"Your
wings are not the only part unfurled,
my son, you're learning and
will never quit."
And heaven's not a time or place at
all;
it's being perfect- barriers all surpassed!
You'll find
perfection, if such speed's your call,
when going any takes no
time. That's fast."
Keep learning son, and you'll begin to
see
where nothing lays beyond reality.
11. An Instructor
Where
nothing lays beyond reality,
Jon let his love become his life's new
goal.
He found some others outcast such as he,
assuming what was
meant to be his role.
When Fletcher Lynn Seagull became his
charge,
outcast because his dream was just to fly,
Jon felt an
obligation to discharge,
Jon taught him how- and more, he taught
him why.
For now, 'twas not for him alone he strove,
but for all
blinded by their seagullhood.
He sought to share life's very
treasure trove,
to teach the Flock their blindness was not
good.
The mission seemed to some to overwhelm,
one needed only
guidance at the helm.
12. Return to
Flock
One needed only guidance at the helm.
and Jonathon was
now the one to teach.
"Your mind can go to any place or
realm;
there is no speed that lies beyond your reach."
To
seven students he announced, "It's now
that to the Flock we
turn." Some anguish rose
among his group. "By law we're
outcasts, how
can we return?" Jon told them how it
goes.
"We're not now flock, and where we wish, we go."
and
thus they flew, a tight formation group,
they were perhaps the very
first airshow!
The Flock's unblinking eyes all watched the
troop.
Within Flock's view their training did persist.
When
soul's not free one finds one's dreams dismissed.
13. Overcoming the
Physical
When soul's not free one finds one's dreams
dismissed.
One day with dangling wing a gull approached
"It
takes two wings to fly--but still, I've wished..."
"You
want to fly, and so you will", Jon coached."
And when he
did, he screamed, "Look at me fly!"
A thousand gulls
approached the training class
now eager to be shown just how and
why.
Jon taught that ritual habits must not last.
For laws
restricting freedom are contrived;
they served up order only at
great cost,
and while the Flock continued to survive
the thrill
of living freely had been lost.
Enlightenment must several realms
enlist,
Far more than physical events exist.
14. Passing the
Torch
Far more than physical events exist.
Your body's just a
picture in your mind,
and vagaries of time are part of this.
You're
anywhere you want to be, you'll find.
When Jonathon left - thought
himself away,
a student stepped into the teacher role.
And
Fletcher knew that he too'd learn some day
and teleport to Jon on
beach or shoal.
For while we're here and now it's also true
that
now is also everywhere right now
and quantum physics makes up part
of you
through multi-universes any how.
Enlightenment consists
special things
To fly was so much more than flapping wings
15.
To fly was so much more
than flapping wings
So tight a curve he tried, he stalled and
fell.
"Conform", they said, try doing seagull
things.
I'll study flight and soon I will excel
He broke the gull
speed record after all.
By accident he flew toward home at
night;
he left Flock-thought for inspiration's call.
He just
missed hitting flock of gulls in flight.
The flock had cast him out
and set him free.
his freedom took him to a higher realm
where
nothing lay beyond reality,
one needed only guidance at the
helm.
When soul's not free one finds one's dreams dismissed.
Far
more than physical events exist.
3.
Hemjit
John Donne (1573-1631)
The Canonisation
For God's sake hold your
tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsy,
or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or
ruined fortune flout,
With wealth your
state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a
course, get you a place,
Observe his
honor, or his grace,
Or the king's real, or his
stampèd face
Contemplate; what
you will, approve,
So you will let me
love.
Alas, alas, who's injured
by my love?
What merchant's
ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have
overflowed his ground?
When did my colds
a forward spring remove?
When did
the heats which my veins fill
Add one
more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and
lawyers find out still
Litigious men,
which quarrels move,
Though she and I
do love.
Call us what you will, we
are made such by love;
Call her one, me
another fly,
We're tapers too, and at
our own cost die,
And we in us find
the eagle and the dove.
The phœnix
riddle hath more wit
By us; we
two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing
both sexes fit.
We die and rise
the same, and prove
Mysterious by this
love.
We can die by it, if not
live by love,
And if unfit for
tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be
fit for verse;
And if no piece of
chronicle we prove,
We'll build
in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a
well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as
half-acre tombs,
And by these
hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for
Love.
And thus invoke us: "You,
whom reverend love
Made one another's
hermitage;
You, to whom love was
peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole
world's soul contract, and drove
Into the
glasses of your eyes
(So made
such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you
epitomize)
Countries, towns,
courts: beg from above
A pattern of your
love!"
4.
Martin Enckell
Martin Enckell (born
1954)
Saint Petersburg
in the city of the
sphinxes, and the mothers,
in the city where death’s
sphinx
rests in double majesty,
and where the mothers
bear the bread home, out to
the infinities of kneeling concrete,
where the children, the
children increasingly often refuse to find their way home,
in this city of the
mothers, and the sphinxes,
life writes its shadow
script, as in fever,
as if an enormous
tubercular angel had lain down to die
over the Neva’s delta,
over the mirage of stone and the marsh river’s dark reflections,
over golden pinnacles and
cupolas, over feverish gold, over façades doomed to beauty,
over palaces and portals
where raw cold mist drifted in, over the trampled jewel
and the suburbs that mock,
over the weighed-down marshes, and over weighed-down fates,
dizzying fates, and
harrowed, that were scattered,
and are still scattered,
into nothingness – in the city of the sphinxes, and the mothers.
***
she is old and bent, she
begs, begs her way in
behind your eyes, by one of
the passages down to the underworld,
and you implore her,
implore her not to look like your mother,
night after night her youth
rolls in over you,
night after night you
approach requiems she will never write,
night after night she
freezes into pictures you have no access to
***
in a white dress, by the
window, in that light cool room,
she stands listening to the
lingering echo
from a gate that has
slammed shut, watching as through veils
the retinue of phantoms
from the Marinsky, sylphides and future doomed
who silently stride across
the Neva’s frail dark ice
***
dawn after dawn death
stands
and polishes, caresses,
caresses her doorknob,
dusk after dusk she locks
you
in her gaze, a gaze that
has swept over a whole century
***
and in a black decolleté
dress, in the icy palace,
she dances then, all night
long, her bridal waltz
with ghost after ghost,
until she dances with the dawn
in whose eyes red spiders
gleam, and she hears the iron gates
slam shut about the rooms,
the rooms where the taiga and the tundra begin
***
night after night she
freezes into the memories where death constantly divides,
night after night she
approaches those she loved, over the Styx,
night after night she rolls
a waxworks of torments over you,
she is one of the many, one
of the dumb, she is all and each,
who stood and waited, for
months and years, who stood and queued
and waited, outside Kresty,
the martyrdom, the prison that sanctified the word.
***
life writes its corroding
shadow script over the most beautiful of cities,
as though an angel, an
enormous tubercular angel, were trying to bless all that is doomed,
by letting itself be
blessed down in the slowly sinking foundations of beauty,
while death, indifferent,
apparently indifferent, watches death, in double majesty,
out of frozen stone, above
the river, above the Styx – in the city of the mothers, in Saint
Petersburg.
5.
Pamela
Vikram Seth (born 1952)
Mistaken
I smiled at you because I
thought that you
Were someone else; you
smiled back; and there grew
Between two strangers in a
library
Something that seems like
love; but you loved me
(If that's the word)
because you thought that I
Was other than I was. And
by and by
We found we'd been mistaken
all the while
From that first glance,
that first mistaken smile.
A Style Of Loving
Light now restricts itself
To the top half of trees;
The angled sun
Slants honey-coloured rays
That lessen to the ground
As we bike through
The corridor of Palm Drive
We two
Have reached a safety the
years
Can claim to have created:
Unconsummated, therefore
Unjaded, unsated.
Picnic, movie, ice-cream;
Talk; to clear my head
Hot buttered rum — coffee
for you;
And so not to bed
And so we have set the
question
Aside, gently.
Were we to become lovers
Where would our best
friends be?
You do not wish, nor I
To risk again
This savoured light for
noon's
High joy or pain.
6.
KumKum
William Carlos Williams
(1883 - 1963)
1. Pastoral
When I was younger
It was plain to me
I must make something of
myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire,
ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel-staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best
of all colors.
No one
will believe this
of vast import to the
nation.
2. The Farmer
The farmer in deep thought
is pacing through the rain
among his blank fields,
with
hands in pockets,
in his head
the harvest already
planned.
A cold wind ruffles the
water
among the browned weeds.
On all sides
the world rolls coldly
away:
black orchards
darkened by the March
clouds---
leaving room for thought.
Down past the brushwood
Down past the brushwood
bristling by
the rain sluiced wagon road
looms the artist figure of
the farmer--- composing
---antagonist
3. The Right of Way
In passing with my mind
on nothing in the world
but the right of way
I enjoy on the road by
virtue of the law--
I saw
an elderly man who
smiled and looked away
to the north past a
house---
a woman in blue
who was laughing and
leaning forward to look up
into the man’s half
averted face
of an old man
who said
at the door--
Sunshine today!
For which
death shaves
him twice
a week
4. The Poem
It’s all in
the sound. A song.
Seldom a song. It should
be a song—made of
particulars, wasps,
a gentian—something
immediate, open
scissors, a lady’s
eyes—waking
centrifugal, centripetal
5. The Horse
The horse moves
independently
without reference
to his load
He has eyes
like a woman and
turns them
about, throws
back his ears
and is generally
conscious of
the world. Yet
he pulls when
he must and
pulls well, blowing
fog from
his nostrils
like fumes from
the twin
exhausts of a car.
7.
Priya
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(born 1918)
Freedom to Breathe
A shower fell in the night
and now dark clouds drift across the sky,
occasionally sprinkling a
fine film of rain.
I stand under an apple tree
in blossom and I breathe.
Not only the apple tree but
the grass round it glistens
with moisture; words cannot
describe the sweet fragrance
that pervades the air. I
inhale as deeply as I can, and the
aroma invades my whole
being; I breathe with my eyes open,
I breathe with my eyes
closed-I cannot say which gives me
the greater pleasure.
This, I believe, is the
single most precious freedom that
prison takes away from us;
the freedom to breathe freely
as I now can. No food on
earth, no wine, not even a woman's kiss
is sweeter to me than this
air steeped in the fragrance of flowers,
of moisture and freshness.
No matter that this is only
a tiny garden, hemmed in by five-story
houses like cages in a zoo.
I cease to hear the motorcycles backing
radios whining, the burble
of loudspeakers. As long as there is fresh
air to breathe under an
apple tree after a shower, we may survive a little
longer.
Bertolt Brecht (1898 –
1956)
On the Term of Exile
No need to drive a nail
into the wall
To hang your hat on;
When you come in, just drop
it on the chair
No guest has sat on.
Don’t worry about
watering the flowers—
In fact, don’t plant
them.
You will have gone back
home before they bloom,
And who will want them?
If mastering the language
is too hard,
Only be patient;
The telegram imploring your
return
Won’t need translation.
Remember, when the ceiling
sheds itself
In flakes of plaster,
The wall that keeps you out
is crumbling too,
As fast or faster.
Translated from the German
by Adam Kirsch
8.
Joe
Meena Kandasamy (born
1984)
1. Lines addressed to a
warrior
come.
colonise me.
creep into the
hollows
of my
landscape—my eyes click lock:
no more the
drawing of the gates.
set
up your home your office
the
writing desk and the trading post.
ignore the
sand-brown
of my skin—a
willing blind
i’ll never know
black from white.
take
me and talk of your finer finish
stunned
i yield, so script your stories here.
invade.
this inner-space.
adjust the pace
and pulse
of marching
armies—and house
your machine
guns, its manuals.
populate
me with anthems
the
songs of wrath and those of war.
draft words that
echo
of gunfire, to
accompany
my lone dance of
submission.
though
prose mad and power crazy, you
conquer
me, never with malice or manhood.
capture.
every territory.
fill up all my
blank skin
to resound with
the strike of scimitars,
the sadness of
success.
have
all your battles lost, or won,
chronicled
across my line of down.
2. Mulligatawny Dreams
anaconda. candy. cash.
catamaran.
cheroot. coolie. corundum. curry.
ginger. mango.
mulligatawny.
patchouli. poppadom. rice.
tatty. teak. vetiver.
i dream of an english
full of the words of my language.
an
english in small letters
an english that shall tire a white man’s
tongue
an english where small children practice with smooth round
pebbles in their mouth to the spell the right ra
an english
where a pregnant woman is simply stomach-child-lady
an english
where the magic of black eyes and brown bodies
replaces the
glamour of eyes in dishwater blue shades
and the airbrush romance
of pink white cherry blossom skins
an english where love means
only the strange frenzy
between a man and his beloved, not between
him and his car
an english without the privacy of its many rooms
an english with suffixes for respect
an english with more than
thirty six words to call the sea
an english that doesn’t
belittle brown or black men and women
an english of tasting with
five fingers
an english of talking love with eyes alone
and
i dream of an english
where men
of that spiky, crunchy
tongue
buy flower-garlands of jasmine
to take home to their coy
wives
for the silent demand of a night of wordless whispered love
. . .
9.
Preeti
Yrsa Daley-Ward
(born ? )
1. True Story
It isn’t that dad doesn’t
love you or your brother
said Mum, greasing up our
ashy legs with Vaseline
Or that your auntie Amy’s
a man stealing back-stabbing, cheating bitch
who can’t keep a man so
she has to steal somebody else’s.
We just don’t see eye to
eye on much, that’s all
and he wouldn’t stop
eating cashew nuts in bed
It’s not that you mother
and I hate each other
said Dad, pushing a
crumpled ten pound note into my chinos pocket
…or that I forgot about
your birthday
but I need time to think
now. I’m moving in with Amy
and anyway, your mum cooks
with too much salt.
It wasn’t so much an
affair, you understand
said Auntie Amy, lacing up
my brothers small Nike trainers
and picking out my knots
with the wooden comb shaped like a fist
but a meeting of minds
outside of our respective vows
And bodies, muttered mum,
when I told her later.
Two faced tramp. What a
joke.
Don’t tell anyone I said
that.
Don’t tell anyone I said
that.
It’s not as though your
mums exactly an angel, either
said dad with blood red
eyes
and a pulsing vein in his
forehead
finishing the last of his
whisky
and auntie Amy hissed, Easy
Winston, you’ve had enough
and dad said, Don’t tell
me what to do
not even my wife yet, and
you think you know it all.
It not that your family are
going to hell, necessarily
said grandma, boiling up
the green banana, yam and dumpling
and grating the coconut
onto the rice and peas
They must just accept Jesus
Christ into their lives
and put away the drink and
sin and all the lies.
Now go and wash your hands
and set the table.
Don’t worry, child.
We’ll pray for them
tonight.
(You can hear her recite
this by skipping to 6:52 – 8:31 min at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAZEWdb_vMg
)
2. Scent
In theory
I have written you out of
my memory.
Still, the middle of my
face
refuses to be told.
I’m undone. Perhaps it is
the air in my head.
Three years. And I did too
much work on our love.
Three years
and I can't undo the
problem of your scent.
It is a horrid and
complicated fact.
My fifth sense an ambush. I
walk by the bakery, chip shop,
flower stall, shopping
centre,
leather goods store
all the Mornings in
Lancashire still smell like you.
Last week I was caught in a
storm overseas.
When the rain smell drove
me silly
all I could see were your
eyes.
Now home, I light the
stove. I cook new food these days
from recipe books. Now that
you’re gone I can fry meat.
I buy a perfume I know you
hate
and spread it on your side
of the bed.
still
you greet me in waves I can
not decipher.
Last night I smelled you in
a dream.
It is a thumbprint now
but I can't forget the
loss.
I dreamed you beautiful.
You are
nothing beautiful. But
three years
and I can’t clean you off
my skin.
Thank you Joe for the wonderful elaboration.
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