POETIC REASONS

Poetry was born with two sisters, language and emotion. Conjoined triplets.  Her spirit is made of wind. She travels the world barefoot with the trees and whispers in the ears of men the meaning of things. Silly things like love and flowers, and great things like the sea and living. But she can’t leave her sisters because she is really their heart. She can’t travel far often she has sons who tell us about her message.

Poetry is what in  a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails wrinkle, makes you want to do this or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss is forever shared and forever your own.’                                                                                   -Dylan.

Yeah…what he said. She had many great sons, some greater than others but her greatest emissary was Ricardo Neftali Reyes, known to you as Pablo Neruda. In him, she was reborn. And in her others too; Bukowski, Qabbani, Hikmet and countless others who as ‘priests of the invisible’ also sought to free their mother from the harsh rules of those who proclaimed themselves her heirs but really wanted to enslave her. She can never die, not while there are those who know what flowers and love, and the sea and living mean.

PABLO NERUDA

Body of a woman, white hills,

white thighs,

You look like a world lying in surrender,

My rough peasant’s body digs

into you,

and makes the son leap from the depths of the earth…

Body of a woman, I sonnet

I love Neruda. He is the absolute poet of my soul. He is earnest and unabashed in the way he celebrates sex and sensuality. How he tangles metaphors to explain his love for a woman and his land in a way that is subtle and seamless. They are the same to him.

Here I love you.

In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.

The moon glows like phosphorus on the vagrant waters….sometimes,

I get up early and even my soul is wet…

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain,

I love you still among these cold things…

Here I love you

He whispers about the loneliness and the grief of a love lost to him.

Tonight, I can write the saddest lines,

write for example, ‘the night is shattered

and the blue stars shiver in the distance’…I loved her

And sometimes she loved me too…

To think I don’t have her, to feel that I have lost her,

to hear the immense night more immense without her and

the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

The night is shattered and she is not with me.

I don’t love her, that is certain, but how I loved her…love is brief

forgetting lasts so long…

I can write the saddest lines

He resounds; he magnifies and quietly thrills with words, only words. You can be very big or very small in his poetry. I won’t tell you. I’ll show you.

And it was at that age…

Poetry arrived in search of me. I don’t know,

I don’t know where it came, from winter or

a river.

I don’t know how or when,

no they were not voices,

They were not words, nor silence,

but from a street I was

summoned.

From the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

or returning alone, there I was without a face

And it touched me.

I did not know what to say,

my mouth

had no way

with names

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,

faint, without substance,

pure

nonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows

nothing,

and suddenly I saw,

the heaves unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating plantations,

shadow perforated,

riddled

with arrows, fire and

flowers,

the winding night, the

universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry

void, likeness ,image of mystery,

felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke loose on the wind.

Poetry

 

CHARLES BUKOWSKI, my Hank. Poet of the low-lifes of which I am one. His drunken, rambling and haunted poetry has led many to argue that his wasn’t poetry at all. And what do I know about rules, iambic pentameters, rhyme….I know nothing of rules except how to break them. I know nothing except that he moves me.

 

I pick up the skirt,

I pick up the sparkling

 beads

In black,

this thing that moved once

around flesh,

and I call God a liar,

I say anything that moved

 like that

or knew

my name

could never die,

in the common verity of dying,

And I pick up her lovely dress,

all her loveliness gone,

and I speak to all the gods,

Jewish gods and Christ-gods,

chips of blinking things,

idols, pills, bread

fathoms, risks,

knowledgeable surrender,

rats in a gravy of two

 gone quite mad,

without a chance,

hummingbird knowledge, humming bird chance.

I lean upon this,

I lean on all this,

and I know her dress upon my arm

but

they will not give her back to me.

For Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough.

 

I almost cannot resist adding ‘freedom’ which is a personal favourite of mine. Bukowski was the quintessential tortured artist…who bleeds for love.

 

He drank wine all night of

The 28^th,

and he kept thinking of her,

the way she talked and walked and loved,

the way she told him things that seemed true,

but were not,

and he knew the colour of each of her dresses and her shoes,

he knew the stock and curve of each heel,

as well as the leg shaped by it,

And she was out again and when he came home and

 she’d come back with that

special stink again

And she did.

She came in at 3 am in the morning

Filthy like a dung eating swine,

And he took out a butcher’s

 knife,

And she screamed

backing into the rooming house wall,

Still pretty somehow

in spite of  love’s reek

and he finished the glass of wine,

that yellow dress,

his favourite,

And she screamed again,

and he took up the knife

and unhooked his belt,

and tore away the cloth before her,

and cut off his balls.

And carried them in his hands,

like apricots.

and flushed them down the toilet bowl,

And she kept screaming

 as the room became red,

GOD! O GOD!

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!

And he sat there holding three towels, between his legs

Not caring whether she left or stayed

Wore yellow or green or anything at all.

And one hand holding,

 and one hand lifting,

 he poured another wine.

Freedom

 

Another favourite of mine is NIZAR QABBANI a Middle Eastern poet whose sensual poetry eventually became lyricised as music.

My letters to you,

are greater and more important

than both of  us

they are the only documents

 Where people will discover your beauty,

and my madness.

Light is more important than the lantern

Every time I kiss you

After a long separation,

I feel,

I am putting a hurried love letter,

In a red mailbox.

Every time I kiss you

 

While I don’t think poetry can be compartmentalized in any other way than style. ANTONIO JACINTO, a liberation fighter in Angola is a great African poet. He speaks of his poetry as being alive walking in the streets.  A letter to the contract worker is especially moving and the infusion of native language with English is especially rewarding. He is touted as the greatest Lusophone poet in Africa. Will there ever be another like him…I doubt it.

 

I wanted to write you a letter,

 my love,

A letter to tell of this longing

 to see you and

this fear,

of losing you,

Of this thing which goes deeper than I want,

I feel a nameless pain that surrounds me,

like a sorrow

wrapped around my life.

 

I wanted to write you a letter my love,

A letter of intimate secrets of you,

A letter of memories of you,

Of your lips as red as the tacula fruit

Of your hair as dark as the diloa fish

Of your eyes as gentle as the macongue

Of your breasts firm….your caresses,

better than I find down here…I wanted to write

you a letter my love, but oh my love, I cannot understand
why it is, why it is, why it is, my dear
that you cannot read
and I – oh the hopelessness! -cannot write!

 

Read some poetry.

 

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