We had Devika reciting from Rudyard Kipling who has been chosen numerous times. The poem about a lost road through the woods is a recollection of something lost:
where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Geetha’s choice was Jiddu Krishnamurti who was brought up to be a seer and mystic and later threw off that persona and freed himself. In this poem he discovers the entire tree from a single leaf:
The entire tree, its great trunk,
Its many branches, and its thousand leaves,
And an immense part of the sky.
I swore there there was no other tree, no other part to the sky –
His schools survive as a legacy of an approach to eduction through nature, the most famous being the Rishi Valley School in Madanapalle, AP. There is a rock, I am told, where students go to meditate. Birdwatching is a particular activity that is encouraged.
The Meditation rock at Rishi Valley School
Joe had recourse to a poem by a poet who lamented the great calamity of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Refaat Alareer who foresaw his own death left a death poem about what should happen afterward. It would cause a little boy to look up and see hope in the sky. The poem If I Should Die has been translated into hundreds of languages, and Joe preferred to recite it in a simple Hindi version with the original English alongside.
Kavita’s choice of Sarojini Naidu as a poet was a poem that describes bangle sellers who brought a ray of golden light:
Who will buy these delicate, bright
Rainbow-tinted circles of light?
Lustrous tokens of radiant lives,
For happy daughters and happy wives.
Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) was known as the ‘Nightingale of India’ because of her lyrical poetry. She was a political activist, and freedom fighter too.
KumKum chose two poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, a favourite of Bobby Paul George who was a co-founder of KRG. They are humanistic poems and both have a sad ring, one extending empathy for a cripple, and the other for a lonely star that seems to call out to him:
I long to still my beating heart.
Beneath the sky’s vast dome I long to pray . . .
Of all the stars there must be far away
A single star which still exists apart.
Pamela chose a poem by a young black poet Amanda Gorman who was called on to celebrate the inauguration of Mr Biden as President in 2021 by reading a prose-poem titled The Hill We Climb. Her costume (a red Prada headband and yellow Prada coat) was more striking than the words, mostly a borrowed feel-good kind of rhetoric:
And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.
Beneath the sky’s vast dome I long to pray . . .
Of all the stars there must be far away
A single star which still exists apart.
Pamela chose a poem by a young black poet Amanda Gorman who was called on to celebrate the inauguration of Mr Biden as President in 2021 by reading a prose-poem titled The Hill We Climb. Her costume (a red Prada headband and yellow Prada coat) was more striking than the words, mostly a borrowed feel-good kind of rhetoric:
And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.
For my money there should be a ‘not’ before the first striving ...
Amanda Gorman Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, May 2021
She became a fashion influencer immediately afterwards with a photo-shoot for the Vogue magazine.
The moment when Poetry struck Pablo Neruda and changed his course in life is celebrated in a poem of that name that Saras read:
Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know whereit came from, from winter or a river.
…
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
His romantic ardour is expressed feverishly in the poem Don't Go Far Off.
may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest,
Shoba selected poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, author of a score of books and the first black woman to serve as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, at the Library of Congress. Sadie and Maud tells the story of two sisters, and though Maud is the one who avoided trouble she is described at the end thus:
Is a thin brown mouse.
She is living all alone
In this old house.
Thomo selected the uncle of the folk singer Pete Seeger, singer and composer of famous songs like Where Have All The Flowers Gone and We Shall Overcome. The uncle, Alan Seeger, was one of the many poets sacrificed on the vast fields of massacre which the fields of Belgium became in WWI – Ypres, Passchendaele, and so on. Like Alareer in modern Gaza, Alan Seeger had a premonition of death when writing his poem I Have a Rendezvous with Death:
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
…
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Th final poem was by the poet and diplomat who wrote those unforgettable lines in To My Coy Mistress, but here he provided for Zakia, The Definition of Love. This poet knows the intimate geometry of love:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
Marvell had the gift of stating in rhyme pithily and inimitably the essence of human experience.
