Glopowrimo 28

Glopowrimo #28 "The words of my roaring"

Here,
I said
I set up these lamps on the floor
diyas
with oil in them
and wicks
I light this imaginary candle
I set up candles
50 or more
290 or more
I will light them all
I myself will play the violins in the background
Let my tears faIl
I will put the flowers on the photos of the children
When they were killed was it not I who was killed?
I will make the memorial cards and keep them on the wall
I will hold the
night vigil alone
I will make the march
multiplying my heart, my grief, into a thousand shadow-people
I will people the streets of this city, this whole world, alone, with shades of the dead and the living dead
I will grieve alone
the glory of the vanquished reign

I will make poetry out of these imaginary things
the diyas, the candles, the flowers, the cards
the vigils, the prayers, the mourning, the marches, the candle lit processions
the shadows
all - that did not take place
I will announce the unspoken message to the world
not to fear the tangled skein of history
not to fear the new protectors
who cannot differentiate
between the terrorist and the innocent
who practise eye for eye
touch one of us
and we will ten of you
blood for blood
real blood
and the whole world blind
I will make my poem about a poem that is not a poem
made of things that do not exist except in words
will bleed silently unreal blood in pols with red sweat and tears
I will again ascend the cross
I will be killed
Was it not Easter, after all?
I will not ask why
I will not even answer back to the sky
(We can do greater things than these)
asking why have you forsaken us?
I will only allow my breath to run out
and this poem to bleed silently
I will become a Muslim
A Hindu
A Jew
A Buddhist
A Jain
A Sikh
An anything
to stop the killing
and the pain
while always remaining a Christian
and a poet
I will let my poem bleed silently
I will call it a house of cards
To stop the carnage
I will hold it up
fragile, and also build a sand-castle of a poem
I will call it a paper plane
I will call it a paper boat
I will call it an origami crane
But I will make the poem
fly and float
I will set up a white flag on the sand-castle
and protect it from the waves of the oceans
I will make the house of cards stand
I have poetry, that sleight of hand

Where are the dead?
Where were the mourners?
Where are the living?
Will we not all go into the same house in the end?
The house of death?
Why do some kill each other
and disturb the peace of the ones like me
who only want to write poetry
and ebb away like an outgoing tide
quietly
leave no mark behind?
Why do you make me roar like a tsunami
when all I want to do is drop like the breeze
a benison on your head?
Come out of the shadows, my faceless enemy
You, even you, I will still embrace
even though you do not understand me
and you will be turned into me or ashes
Are you not only the other side of me
and does not the same blood run in our veins?
Do we all not have mothers, fathers, brothers,
sisters, wives, children and memories of joy and sorrow that match?

Come with me again to the fields of our childhood and its beaches
Somehow may my poem reach you
and let us fly kites
not waste our lives
play marbles, collect shells
tag, you're it, hide and seek, doctor doctor, catch me if you can, hopscotch
children again
and not deal in grown-up lies
No angel exists
if not to help Life
No book is sacred
if not the Book of Life
Only Life is God
which is It as it is
Come, see my tears
and make each drop a pearl
Come, read this poem
made only of words.
I stand defenceless before you
a man of peace
Can you hear me call
across time and space
asking you to give up your anger, hatred, violence, weapons, groups,
twisted hermeneutics, cruel plans and ways
and embrace
the coming future
of Peace?

A meta-poem of an elegy for those who died in NZ, in the Easter bombings etc.

Glopowrimo 27 - based on Shakespeare's sonnets.

Shall I compare you to a summer's day

Though your eyes are nothing like the sun?

Let not the marriage of poetic devices play

To make this, my Shakespearean jaunt, anything but fun

Your hair reminded him of wires?

Tut, tut, that was a cruel simile.

Almost like throwing at you silver spears.

Later he makes it up, in a jiffy!

Poetry is not poetry, if no one reads it

Anymore than love is love, if it bends.

With the remover to remove - unfit!

Poetry, and love, should for the world's wounds make amends

Shake a scene or leg; be great, or wrap your player's heart in a tiger's hide.

Write poetry, love a woman or man, but make sure your verse and love doth abide!

Koshyshpere

Ampat Koshy: If you know of the seven types of ambiguity approaching the poem may become easier. The first note of ambiguity for me is what Arun Kolatkar means in the second line by saying that her insomnia may seep through the great walls of history. Does he mean women down the ages have insomnia? I think so. The use of "may" throws things a bit into confusion. Is she to be taken seriously or not? Now we come to the crux of the poem which is somewhat but not entirely patriarchal. She is lonely, as she has no one to spend time with her. Then we come to the key line about the spiked man who can be spiked as in a drink is spiked meaning drunken on alcohol or her and impaling suggests an act of force, but we are unable to decide if he is husband or lover or a random person, and it could even be rape. What the recipe signifies is anyone's guess coming immediately after. Her whimper being null and void suggests her insignificance and the insignificance of all women in a city and patriarchal set up. Further on 'darkling' refers to the nightingale in Keats, perhaps, and is child of dark suggesting perhaps her skin tone as well as how a woman perhaps made pregnant out of wedlock or by rape is seen by the doctors, maybe in India. Shoot up connects with spiked and impale with explode - are the doctors too not adding to the crime if she is being aborted? She 'may' still only damn man. She curses humanity by poisoning 23 cockroaches - is there a pun on cock and roach? - but at the same time maybe it suggests that she prefers humanity still despite everything, mistakenly, or not, due to being brainwashed or not, and not cockroaches that may survive a nuclear holocaust. To sum up, there may still be an undertow of disturbing patriarchy in the poem but it succeeds due to the use of ambiguity and 'undecidability' and indeterminacy in it (Marjorie Perloff's terms) that makes it cut both ways or many ways in terms of meanings it can generate in the minds of different readers. "Seven types of Ambiguity
1.The first type of ambiguity is the metaphor, that is, when two things are said to be alike which have different properties. This concept is similar to that of metaphysical conceit.
2.Two or more meanings are resolved into one. Empson characterizes this as using two different metaphors at once.
3.Two ideas that are connected through context can be given in one word simultaneously.
4.Two or more meanings that do not agree but combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author.
5.When the author discovers his idea in the act of writing. Empson describes a simile that lies halfway between two statements made by the author.
6.When a statement says nothing and the readers are forced to invent a statement of their own, most likely in conflict with that of the author.
7.Two words that within context are opposites that expose a fundamental division in the author's mind." I find most of these types of ambiguity at work here - should explicate more on that later