Pluto’s children

Pinpoints of light prickle the belly
of the night: fireworks blaze to actualize
a new year. The horizon arches
its back in an ecstasy of excess.

Flares follow the curve of a distended
abdomen to its end in a slow gaze:
a body smaller than Pluto is caught
in the after- flash of an old day, staring.

© Sara P. Dias

Pluto’s children’ was first published online by the SLiP Poetry Project: Black armband day for poetry, January 2012.

Finuala Dowling said of the poem:

Sara P. Dias in ‘Pluto’s Children’ and J.D Warner in ‘This Year’s Resolution in Polite Conversation’ offer an original take on the old theme of time.

The Silver One

Roots netted by the coral
and the bristling acacia,
the leaves of the birch tree,
serrated in the image of her seed,
stand out among the scalloped and feathery:
foredoomed to project a picturesque
Northern clime, rust and red
set in at the advent of a
Southern pubescent spring.

She is denied the
the rapture of young leaves
in their rub and slip
against one another,
frisked about in the spring breeze:
sap presses through her skin
as if after a winter thaw, dries,
tightening it, making it inflexible,
so that when her buds erupt bright

over a frosty winter, she feels that
she must be more,
like the naked coral tree with its
flamboyant red tips in spring.
She flares into foliage amid the rimed
trees of a southern hemisphere, a crown
of arched branches, dripping leaves,
resembling that summer’s weeping
willow and drooping karee.

© Sara P. Dias

The Silver One’, was first published online in response to the SLiP Poetry Project: Poetry by numbers, November 2011.


Finuala Dowling said of the poem:

Sara P.Dias managed to make me care about an out-of-synch silver birch tree in her ‘The Silver One’ – quite an achievement since I am usually wary of nature poetry.

The Trio

You speak of converting digital to analogue
and bi-wiring the speakers for
more enveloping frequencies.

Draped warm by a cat and surround sound
my voice strains the lines of a poem
above Keith Jarrett’s crows and swoons,

and is further sifted through your
praise of high fidelity,
until it drifts low and heavy into a sigh.

© Sara P. Dias

The Trio’, was first published online in response to the SLiP Poetry Project: Poetry by numbers, November 2011.


Finuala Dowling said of the poem:

Sara’s ‘The Trio’ plays delightfully with the idea of three-ness and cross-purposes.

Waiting for a sign from the gods

As a very green writer, advanced in age and with no academic credibility, I recently asked a professor if he could write an article about what poetry is, what it isn’t anymore, what it has become and, most importantly, what it shouldn’t be. My questions were born out of a deep frustration with the different signals I feel I get from especially the South African literary community. Also, teaching myself writing without an academic support structure means that I’m constantly groping about:  a play by Sophocles here, a modern poet there, and a haiku over yonder. I grab what few books on poetry I can find in our local library or in bookstores.  Both lack quantity and variety in the poetry department, so my options are limited.

When Prof. replied that there were no answers to the questions I posed, but that he considered them important and felt I should write about my dilemma with SA poetry and my own sense of poetry, I thought, “Aikôna, Sir, you’ll be throwing me to the wolves.” I’ve witnessed ferocious exchanges between seasoned writers and I have no desire to be at the receiving end. I don’t speak Academic and at this stage of my self-imposed learning I don’t know enough to argue.

On reflection I realised that I asked these questions because I want to understand the essence of poetry in the hope of becoming a better writer, and, from what I’ve read so far, agonizing over ‘what is poetry’ is part of every writer’s journey. I’ve been waiting for a ping moment that would indicate that I’ve come to a deep understanding of poetry, maybe in the form of a sign from the gods of poetry.

I looked up the word “essence” in my Collins Concise English Dictionary and found the following definitions:

1. a perfect  or complete form of something

2. Philosophy. the unchanging and unchangeable inward nature of something

The immutability of this definition exposed my faulty thinking about something that in fact is never static, but always changing because human thought and language are forever adapting. There can therefore be no fixed form of poetry.

Perhaps even more importantly, poetry must happen in the context of on-going human development and achievement, else it would become predictable; and isn’t one characteristic of a poem that it makes something unexpected of the familiar? The word poetry itself is based on the Greek word for doer or creator, and creators keep on finding inspiration in the old and the new to produce something different or improved. Also, by now there must be as many definitions of poetry as there are published poets and critics.

Subjectivity and Context

I may feel that some poetry reads like prose, that it is not distilled or compressed enough, that it looks like a laundry list of emotions, or that it isn’t “turning from the literal” as Harold Bloom would say, but in the context of the information age it may be an effective way of communicating poetic thoughts to readers who don’t have the time to decipher mysteries or open a dictionary.

In a way we’ve come full circle: performance poetry is on the rise, and it relies on sound and gestures, punchiness and catchiness, which must be similar to the way the ancient poets recited poems from memory. This from the Wikipedia on the history of poetry:

In preliterate societies, these forms of poetry were composed for, and sometimes during, performance. There was a certain degree of fluidity to the exact wording of poems. The introduction of writing fixed the content of a poem to the version that happened to be written down and survive. Written composition meant poets began to compose for an absent reader. The invention of printing accelerated these trends. Poets were now writing more for the eye than for the ear.

This reminded me that poetry is meant to be spoken, not just read. In The Art of Reading Poetry, I learnt that Harold Bloom, American writer and literary critic, memorised Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and that he still recites it on those days when he has to “battle depression or adversity, or just the consequences of old age.” (Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer through Robert Frost (New York: HarperCollins Publishers), p. 19).

Because I can barely remember two lines of my own writing, I saw this as a challenge: if he at his age (80+) can remember the whole poem, then surely I can memorise it. I left one of my anthologies open on Ulysses and every morning I would try to retain an extra line. At some stage I managed one third of the poem without checking the book, but this quickly regressed into choppy lines once I gave up the discipline and allowed life to interfere.

Reciting bits of Ulysses out loud gave me a deeper understanding of that yearning for youthful endeavour, that stubborn clinging to ideas of adventure, courage and lively companionship, that urge to keep advancing, no matter what, and how miserable a life it is, in the end, to be confined in any way. But more than that, I became aware of how quiet and graceful the lines are even while describing strong feelings like despair:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rush unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

The Quality of Inevitable Phrasing

In The Best Poems of the English Language, Harold Bloom states that “Intuitively, Tennyson understood what poetry was: argument that could not be separated from song, gesture, dance, and the rhythms of a unique but representative individual’s breath-soul.” (Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer through Robert Frost (New York: HarperCollins Publishers), p. 593). Having said that, he also talks about the “quality of the inevitable that is central to great poetry.” (p. 19).

I think I recognize what he means by “unavoidable wording rather than merely predictable diction” (p. 20): to exercise control over expression to such an extent that lines which are powerful and memorable seem effortless and natural. I’ll quote from the poets I’m getting to know better; first from Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

I never tire of reading the above. I’m in awe of the simplicity of a first line that contains so much. I feel the soft folds of the dressing-gown, the sedateness of the sun, and it makes me long for the smell of oranges and coffee. I imagine the cockatoo depicted on the rug in full flight in a far-off jungle. And then my thoughts darken on the concept of religion, that “ancient sacrifice”, and I think of those awful Sunday mornings when my sister and I had to walk kilometres to church, not because our parents were devout, but because it was the social norm. Easter weekends were especially depressing.

My next example of what I consider magical phrasing is from Repose of Rivers by Hart Crane:

… There beyond the dykes
I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,
And willows could not hold more steady sound.

The “wind flaking sapphire” cuts me every time, and I wonder if the poet is referring to a perverse sense of companionship that he finds in a steady stream of pain. I think many of us have a familiar named Sorrow warming our necks.

The following is from The Listener by John Burnside:

… the low road
peopled with bone-white figures: not
the living, in this aftermath of grass,
and not the dead we mourn, in empty kirks
or quiet kitchens, halfway through the day,
but something like the absence of ourselves
from our own lives,
some other luck
that would not lead
to now.

(The Listener by John Burnside, The Paris Review, July 12, 2011)

These lines appeal to me because I see a universal truth in “not the dead we mourn … but something like the absence of ourselves from our own lives …” and I can think of no better way to say it.

Below is an example of a keenly observed moment captured in the amber of a haiku:

pink river
a heron pulls away
to the stars

John Barlow

(British Haiku Society)

There is effort in the pulling away from what is in all probability yet another beautiful sunset over a river. The heron might be pulling away from the mundane in order to discover the unknown.

The following haiku made me smile. There is humour in the disgust and self-disgust at being alone in a sushi bar in the middle of winter when one yearns for warmth and company.

Mid-winter evening,
alone at the sushi bar—
just me and this eel

Billy Collins

(Modern Haiku, Volume 35.3, Autumn 2004)

The few poems above represent what I feel is inevitable phrasing. I have many more to discover, especially in South Africa where we have so many languages and other forms of poetry, for example praise poetry.

Some poets write only for fellow academics and poets, others believe that poetry should be accessible to all. I’m grateful to the latter, but the Internet does make understanding difficult poetry easier.

We have podcasts and YouTube now, and maybe in the near future we will have HoloVID projections of poetry readings and performances in our living rooms and schools; and with it I have no doubt that a new kind of poem will emerge.

My conclusion is that I will wait forever for signs to descend from the gods. In the meantime I can work at crafting an inevitable phrase.

Sara P. Dias (October 2011)

A Sentencing

What soundings we take by chiming
metre to meaning and sound to the senses,
we glean from lines weighted
at the end; an appeal to the curious
to find significance,
true or fanciful,
in their depth, but in conclusion
a wordsmith relies on intuition and ear –
prescription be damned:

in echoes over time
we plumb a line’s measure
as the signals traced
turn and ping in memory.

© Sara P. Dias

To read life

I would have liked to know
how to read  the world in the
precise language of white-eyes
flitting into existence
in a sprinkler’s shower,
or how to translate
the sea into a mother.

The sea is endless and cold,
unlike the snug respite of a womb.
On this shore sailboats cant empty
on the beach, their holds quiet,
while crossings by ferry
swell to overwhelm
the individual voice.

Would I have recited life more truly
if I ousted the gods of poetry
and their ecstasies, built shacks
from the broken towers of their song,
or  declared barren their mistress moon –
I would have liked to know
how to write the world.

© Sara P. Dias

‘To read life’, was first published online in response to the SlipNet Poetry Project: No real knowing. July, 2011.

Finuala Dowling said of the poem:

Sara P.Dias’ poem ‘To read life’ is a complex but rewarding poem.  Her strong images (‘white-eyes/ flitting into existence/ in a sprinkler’s shower’) and patterned references to different types of speaking (‘cant’, ‘ecstasies’, ‘precise language’, ‘recited’, ‘declared’) speak to the idea of a writing and reading life.  How does one ‘write the world’, after all, unless one has read it?  For me, Sara’s poem beautifully corrals the longing and elusiveness that not only inspire us while we write, but haunt us after we’ve written.

Questions from a Park Bench

“Look for the ridiculous in everything, …”  Jules Renard

How many times do the derricks swing their
interference with the sky,
flinging birds outward into
scissored clouds – for whom this
segmenting of breath and air,
who will inherit such stark division?

whiteout

For your children, you say, and look how
reflected light bedazzles the child.
But she cannot skip after her own shadow –
who will say where the sun is?
What a queer notion to entertain:
to pluck down a nest to raise a cage.

whiteout

© Sara P. Dias

First published on SLiP (Stellenbosch Literary Project) as part of their poetry project.

Finuala Dowling said of the poem:

Sara P. Dias’ “Questions from a Park Bench” is a poem that resists easy interpretation, but conjures such strong conflated images of play parks, construction sites and oil rigs, that one wants to pause and ask questions. Is this a protest poem, I wondered.

Emotional Truancy

In response to Dagga – Part Five by Rustum Kozain – http://groundwork.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/dagga-part-five/

I love your Dagga series and I look forward to it being published one day.

You must experience everything in life intensely in order to remember it so well. Life chafes at me, and I have no carapace, but I don’t have your memory. Only my body remembers, not my mind. I suspect that my sister and I should have been on antidepressants in high school already, but in those days these things were frowned upon and not talked about. I seldom talk to my mother: even today she is ashamed that I am on antidepressants and she refuses to discuss the fact that she never protected my sister and me from my depressed and alcoholic father’s abuse, and that she only cares about my brother. She is in some or other sick form of denial whereby she negates the agonies of our minds by repeating this mantra over the phone: “‘n Mens moet net vorentoe kyk. Ek wil net hê julle moet gelukkig wees.” Only she suffered being married to an arty but depressed suiplap of a policeman. And just look how she made sure that my sister and I were always neatly dressed so that nobody in her family or circle of acquaintances could say that we were neglected in any way. Unfortunately, emotional truancy is not a skanky teenager that can be glared at or reprimanded.

My memories are not in the realm of that which can be retained, but there is remembered pain nevertheless. Incidents in which either my sister or I was abused have become so mixed-up in my mind that I can’t remember whether it was my sister or me who spilled the orange juice at the dinner table and who my father slammed into the fridge with an elbow, almost casually, still seated, as my sis/I poured more juice for him from the fridge that stood right next to him.

I am aware of what could possibly be called a racist nostalgia by some: my sister and I walked long distances, even at night, to church, parties or to town. We also knew the streets of central Jozi very well: it was many blocks from the train station to the cinema near the Carlton Centre, or was it the Carlton Hotel? Also, my mother worked at Volkskas Bank in Market Street, I think, near the old City Hall. In any case, only my dad drove a car, so the rest of us, including my mother, had to walk almost everywhere. My mother never learned how to drive a car, so she still walks to nearer destinations. Now that Roodepoort town itself has become a bit of a slum, she has to get lifts from friends to shopping centres further away.

What I miss is to be able to go anywhere without anxiety or being hyper-aware of my surroundings, without the panic attacks that actually blind me instead of making me observe better.

I often give a lift to women walking long distances from our part of Durbanville to where the taxis stop in Durban Road. At first I couldn’t understand why I do it. We had to walk, catch a bus or a train to our destinations, so why would I care that others have to pound foot? I wondered whether I was doing it out of white guilt or genuine altruism. Then it hit me: I didn’t want them to be attacked as I was, twice, while living in Woodstock. Women are not safe anywhere, especially not around these huge open fields surrounding us.

My body remembers the freedoms and the hurts. I still cannot watch people falling or being smashed down or kicked on TV without getting horripilation running up my legs.

As a white woman especially, I can’t tell those who suffered under apartheid to only move forward, to not dwell on the past, because not only does the body remember, as a psychologist explained to me, but I would then be like my mother: oblivious to another’s pain and emotionally uninvested in the future well-being of others. Intellectually I know she cannot give what she does not have – unconditional love for my sister and me – but my heart aches at that absence regardless. Also, while there always was a void where my emotionally absent father resided, his death merely replaced the hole with a more substantial cavity. Nostalgia, to me, is a violently conflicted business. I push and pull constantly at what should never have been, what was, and the now. And I think that the new South Africa maybe cannot give what it does not have: an emotional investment in the safety and security of everybody’s future, including whites, and that it is as intensely ambivalent about all matters South African as I am.

© Sara P. Dias

2 haiku: New Year

Dew dazzles
the new year – magpie
cocks his head

_

New year’s rain -
stream flows down
yesteryear’s path

_
© Sara P. Dias

haiku: harvest moon

Slow to rise
migrating birds bloat the
harvest moon

_

First published: Asahi Haikuist Network, Dec. 3, 2010

© Sara P. Dias

haiku: autumn wind

Shrike’s small nest
rolls with autumn leaves -
spring too far

_
© Sara P. Dias

2 haiku: autumn moon

Ochre leaves
sink into full moon
heavy hearts

Sated moon
drifts on red leaves
cat enfolds kittens


© Sara P. Dias

2 haiku: 2010 World Cup

Soccer ball
aimed at wet seagull
going home

_

Vuvus blare
I long for the bees
of summer

_

Both first published in Asahi Haikuist Network, July 16, 2010.

© Sara P. Dias (South Africa)

haiku: snow

Below 0°
snowflakes touch portholes
no face alike
_

First published: Asahi Haikuist Network, Feb. 19, 2010

© Sara Dias

Return ticket, please …

(a rondeau)

There’s water on the moon, they say,
enough to wash the grit away
from eyes alit by this detour
mapped out by Greed’s cartographer
who mocks the herd, this way, This way …

I bled the green valley Monday,
all the veins ran dry by Sunday,
while to my children I proffer
the water on the moon, the Moon

they say, which we will reach one day -
my children and cattle today
must tramp the dust even further
to the Rift Valley abattoir
where our bulldozed carcasses lay
bathed in the water on the moon.

© Sara P. Dias

The suffering of hundreds of thousands of animals dying and rotting where they fall, and the slaughter of the emaciated stock that survive being driven over long distances in search of green pasture by starving herders and their dying children, is heart-rending. The headlines are everywhere: The devastation sweeping across Kenya is but one example of prolonged drought caused by climate change, expanding populations, deforestation, overgrazing, crop failure, mismanagement of water resources, corrupt government officials who sell off emergency food, and violent ethnic conflicts over competition for resources. And still we don’t change our behaviour.