SYRIA

What can any one of us say re; the way things are unfolding in the Middle East right now? I have no words to articulate the shock and sorrow I feel at President Obama's decision to intervene with a military strike against Syria. 

Before he left, Seamus Heaney gave us this poem 'The Cure at Troy'. 

_/\_

                               THE CURE AT TROY

                               Human beings suffer,
                               they torture one another,
                               they get hurt and get hard.
                               No poem or play or song
                               can fully right a wrong
                               inflicted or endured.

                               The innocent in gaols
                               beat on their bars together.
                               A hunger-striker's father
                               stands in the graveyard dumb.
                               The police widow in veils
                               faints at the funeral home.

                               History says, Don't hope
                               on this side of the grave.
                               But then, once in a lifetime
                               the longed for tidal wave
                               of justice can rise up,
                               and hope and history rhyme.

                               So hope for a great sea-change
                               on the far side of revenge.
                               Believe that a further shore
                               is reachable from here.
                               Believe in miracles
                               and cures and healing wells.

                               Call the miracle self-healing:
                               The utter self-revealing
                               double-take of feeling.
                               If there's fire on the mountain
                               Or lightning and storm
                               And a god speaks from the sky

                               That means someone is hearing
                               the outcry and the birth-cry
                               of new life at its term.

                               Seamus Heaney

This morning Planet Waves host Eric Francis posted the following article on his website - Eight Arguments Against Going to War in Syria by Stephen Zunes -

http://planetwaves.net/news/human-rights/seven-arguments-against-going-to-war-insyria/

TUESDAY POEM | Limits of Spectacle Lake by T. Clear

                        LIMITS OF SPECTACLE LAKE

                        — in memory, Walter James Clear, 1918–1966 

                               When the sun had slipped behind the hills
                               I said, let’s go back. Forget this business
                               of lures and lines and casting so far
                               the eye could hardly follow the thread
                               out to snag a rainbow’s lip. Afraid
                               we’d lose our way and soon our boat
                               would spin and sink. There we’d sit
                               eye to eye with a million fish.

                               When I was eight I caught my limit.
                               But not before my father turned the boat
                               to shore and let out one last line for luck.
                               I held that rod for all the hope left
                               reeling in the depths. I pulled
                               trout from tangled, churning light
                               slipping underhand.

                               I don’t know who was more the spectacle—
                               the lake, me, or my father guiding the pole
                               between my unbelieving hands. Somehow
                               he trusted in the end of all filtering light.
                               When he died the next winter,
                               I remembered six fish
                               laid out on a plank.

                               Eye to eye with the dead, in the wake
                               of the boat, I learned the limits,
                               the last ripple of life in a dying fish.

                               T.Clear

Somehow. . . 

I met T. Clear online some three or more years ago. 'T' stands for Therese; she prefers to be called 'T'. Last year we met - hooray - in person, in Seattle. I'd arrived at her Brandon Street home a little ahead of her and was waiting on the curb when she returned from her day's work at Melinda's glass studio. We took one glance at each other, laughed wholeheartedly and fell immediately into conversation - not a smidge of 'first-time-meeting' awkwardness. After dropping our various bits of paraphernalia inside the house we headed for the woods T so often writes about on her blog - http://premium-t.blogspot.co.nz/  (a place she seems to visit in all weathers and at any time of day or night!). I imagine by now she'd be capable of walking those forest tracks blind-folded, guided by the sound of her footfall on moss, lichen and tree root, the owls' call or the faint scuffle indicating the presence of eagles as they rummage in their ramshackle eyrie atop their chosen alder. A living-sculpture-of-a-tree in an unexpected clearing, this gnarly-barked giant is not only home to a pair of these majestic birds but also custodian to a diligently-tended, knot-shaped altar of unusual offerings. 

I'm sure I have several of you to thank for my online introduction to T (thank you!). Much-loved poets Theodore Roethke and Seamus Heaney surely had a part to play in our meeting, too. (She and I might have posted Roethke's 'Waking' on the same day/in the same week some years back? Who knows how these connections happen?)  

I dithered at length over which of T's fine poems to post here today. Initially I'd asked her if for permission to post Pond; it was all pretty much typed up and ready to go when the news came in that Seamus Heaney had passed away (oh, sorrowful day). Given the respect and tender regard both T and I have for Seamus Heaney and his work, I decided to hold Pond for another time and instead post Limit of Spectacle Lake. My sense is this would be her preferred poem for this week, too. (She is away at the moment so I'm acting on faith here). 

T - woman, artist, mother, friend, chef, musician, poet - has a rare and exceptional capacity for not shying away from the gritty, dazzling and oft-times shocking realities of life and death. I admire her greatly for this and, too, for the ways in which her poems engage fearlessly with Truth - her own and the collective's. Hers are tenacious poems, poems that ask questions, that mine, probe and penetrate with deep integrity; the same can be said of Seamus Heaney's work. There are times when, reading T's poems, I sense his presence in the room, too. 

Seamus Heaney is considered my many to be one of the great Fathers of Poetry. I commend T's homage to him and her late husband, Mark - Seamus Heaney on the Bathroom Wall - to you. You will notice that today's Limit of Spectacle Lake is dedicated to her late father, Walter James Clear - another reason why I chose this poem instead of Pond for today. 

A suite of six of T's poems were recently published online in the journal Cascadia Review - do visit this site to read them? Several of my favorites are there, including Abandoned Apple Orchard, Earthquake with Forty Pianos and Pond.   

. . . he trusted in the end of all filtering light - T. Clear 
(Photographs/paintings by CB) 

In closing (and by way of a bio) an excerpt from T's blog --- 

"Driving today, after work, in dimming light along Lake Washington, the blue bruised water ruckled-up in the wind, the maples and alders side of the road in every shade of red/orange/yellow.  A swathe of rainbow to the north, a concentrated lump of color sitting just at the horizon. The sky beyond: velvet charcoal.

I kept shouting:
"I live here!"

I've driven that stretch of road so many times, it's easy to take it for granted. Easy to admit to a certain ordinariness in what is never ordinary, never the same from day to day, from hour to hour.

Easy to dismiss the forward-thinking gods who delivered me back to this city that I love, and to whom I say:

thank-you
thank-you
thank-you"

* 

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Helen McKinlay with the poem Matangi Tai - a powerful testament to a vulnerable man, sorely wronged - by Samoan-born poet, novelist and health activist, Sia Figiel -

                        ". . . P.S: Don't go inciting no violence now sis
                                I know you and that heart of yours
                                I can see your salt already boilin' girl
                                But eh, fink of da mens Martin Luther King Jr.
                                And Mahatma Ghandi
                                And taste me in your ocean girl. . . "



Over on the TP hub, Helen writes, "I am always looking for poetry which speaks of the indigenous origins of the poet. Poetry which springs from the poet’s deep love for their homeland; its culture, its beliefs and its values.  Poetry which sometimes bears the scars of conflict, but never bears a grudge…poetry which makes us laugh from the belly and cry from the heart. A few weeks back I found such a poem: Songs of the fat brown woman, and began a search for the poet. . . " 

To read Sia's poem for Matangi Tai and to learn more about her and her work, please click on the quill.  

(Formatting challenges with Blogger today!) 

TUESDAY POEM | The Rain Stick by Seamus Heaney

Upend the rain stick and what happens next is a music you never would have known to listen for (detail)
Charcoal & Pastel on Paper  |  CB  |  c. 2002

                                         THE RAIN STICK 

                                         Upend the rain stick and what happens next
                                         Is a music that you never would have known
                                         To listen for. In a cactus stalk
                                         Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash
                                         Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe
                                         Being played by water, you shake it again lightly
                                         And diminuendo runs through all its scales
                                         Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes
                                         A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,
                                         Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;
                                         Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.
                                         Upend the stick again. What happens next
                                         Is undiminished for having happened once,
                                         Twice, ten, a thousand time before.
                                         Who cares if all the music that transpires
                                         Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
                                         You are like a rich man entering heaven
                                         Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

                                         Seamus Heaney

I unpacked this drawing last week, one of a batch I've had stored away in my little 'side room'. I'd not visited this particular image for a very long time and was surprised by the ways in which it seems - at least, to me - to speak into our current times. Seamus Heaney's Rain Stick provided the original prompt way back in the early 2000s but there's a lot more going on here than the music of that poem. It's always a mystery to me to discover the questions that make their way into our work without our knowing it and without our conscious participation (even when we think we're fully, mindfully engaged?). Behind this image, I found another drawing I'd long considered 'lost', 'gone', 'evaporated' - what was I thinking when I taped it in behind the Rain Stick? (I might post it here some time; it shows a sun dial atop a craggy outcrop - an exploration into Time after repeated readings of T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton.) 

Life is certainly full of unexpected surprises at the moment, including - yesterday - a visit to my garden from a broody, rust-coloured hen. . . lovely! I wonder if she left an egg amongst the red-legged silver beet?  

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Harvey Molloy (his accompanying commentary is exquisite)

with the tender poem Tika

by Saradha Koirala 

                              "Goodbye takes the form of a blessing.

                              My family press tika on our foreheads

                              rupees into my palm.

                              Mountain-high through time and air

                              the red paint dries, the rice grains fall

                              leaving a trail that could surely lead us home. . . " Saradha Koirala

Upend the rain stick and what happens next is a music you never would have known to listen for

Charcoal & Pastel on Paper  |  CB  |  c. 2002

Skirting landfall

          The Peninsula

               When you have nothing more to say, just drive
               For a day all around the peninsula.
               The sky is tall as over a runway,
               The land without marks, so you will not arrive

               But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
               At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
               The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
               And you're in the dark again. Now recall

               The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log.
               That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
               The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
               Islands riding themselves out into the fog.

               And drive back home, still with nothing to say
               Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
               By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
               Water and ground in their extremity. 



               Seamus Heaney 
                      from his collection Door Into The Dark