"I was a voice."

A month ago I received Eavan Boland's new book entitled A Poet's Dublin published by Carcanet Press.  A city I love and a poet I admire.

Today, I found a moment and the stillness within to sit down and begin reading the poems. It has been a disturbing, unsettling few weeks.  Too much pondering over unfinished projects. Too many opportunities to allow the old self-doubts to roost in my heart and cast dark clouds on my spirit.

My growing-up years were spent either on the coast of California or on an island in the Pacific Ocean. I knew and understood the sea and its power on me. It was not until I was in my 40's on my first trip to Ireland that I discovered the deep pull and deep peace of a river. It was this river that told me I had returned home.  And I had not even been aware I was lost.  But until that moment I had not been paying attention.

Photography © Denise Sallee 2010

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The last stanza of Eavan Boland's poem "Anna Liffey" shot straight to my heart today. Though her poem is about Dublin's great River Liffey she ends by reminding me why it was it took a river to save me all those years ago.

In the end

It will not matter

That I was a woman. I am sure of it.

The body is a source. Nothing more.

There is a time for it. There is a certainty

About the way it seeks its own dissolution.

Consider rivers.

They are always en route to

Their own nothingness. From the first moment

They are going home. And so

When language cannot do it for us,

Cannot make us know love will not diminsh us,

There are these phrases

Of the ocean

To console us.

Particular and unafraid of their completion.

In the end

Everything that burdened and distinguished me

Will be lost in this:

I was a voice.
           -From "Anna Liffey" by Eavan Boland

Sparsity - words & writing

I've been dipping my toes into the yet unchartered waters of social media and, for the most part, I've been having a good time. As in my "real" life I avoid politics and social issues/causes. Instead, I want the years left to me to find their focus in the creative endeavor - mine and others.

So, I've noticed that haiku - that sparse and beautifully light form of poetry - has returned. When I see the word Haiku I am immediately whisked back to my childhood when, at some point, it was introduced to me in school.  I remember that it held great fascination for me - like an exotic plant or the whispered memory of a faraway land.

The college library where I work has a new book on haiku:  Favor of Crows by Gerald Vizenor. With a title such as this I was drawn to it and the "aha!" of synchronicity went off when I read the cover and saw that word -again. Haiku.

Perhaps I was onto something worth exploring.

Vizenor writes briefly of his first encounter with haiku and quotes a few examples from the Japanese masters.

I like this one by Kobayashi Issa as he remembers the death of his daughter:

            the world of dew
           is the world of dew
                   and yet…
                   and yet…


Vizenor, in the introduction to his book, speaks of the essence of haiku:  "The heart of haiku is a tease of nature, a concise, intuitive, and original moment."  And this statement recalls the later poetry of Ella Young - her work now influenced by her new home in California.  I leave you with her words:

Artemis (1950).

The moon took off her mask for me

Yester-night,

I saw her strange face

Ivory-white.

Crouching in the jungle, too,

The leopard saw:

And stretched in haughty greeting

A scimitar claw.