"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
--G.K. Chesterton
"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred.../Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you."
--Walt Whitman
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According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
Australian poet P.S. Cottier truly does see the universe in a grain of sand--as well as in a tram ticket, a Caesarian scar, the names of Australian military operations, a shabby bear in the Soviet zoo, a wren visiting a dead friend's garden, and myriad other small details of modern life that she turns into windows on the human condition, in verses both whimsical and profound. Her new collection The Glass Violin (Ginninderra Press, 2008) contains all this and more.
One of the pleasures of reading poetry is finding that someone else has experienced and expressed a precise emotion that you thought was peculiar to you. When Cottier writes, in a poem titled "Forlorn", "The abandonment of teabags is absolute," I feel less silly about my pangs of guilt for turning those neat, dry, nearly immortal little packets into wet lumps of trash. Elsewhere, in "Cutting on Laminex", she reflects on how the scratches on a cutting board outlast the meals prepared there, which segues into awareness of the marks that time has left on her: "I can't recall the accidents, the sharp slice/which scarified, but skin scratches speak/of that open cut, some day, grave of mine." She has kindly given me permission to reprint a poem from this book below.
Rock
I didn't want this, not at all. The rock rolled back, groaning, rasping, birthing brightness. It was meant to make them free. But a single breath, in and out, a teasing pause, then they crucified others; those who walked outside their straitened view of me. Labyrinthine irony, to fill the sarcophagus in my name. Those chaotic echoes darkening on deafness, I hear them still. I'd asked them to put down stones and not to pound down sinners. To understand, or at least, not to irrevocably judge. But when they built their church on rock, of rock, flesh was pushed aside, Golgotha glorified. A mortar and pestle, hope ground against granite. Sometimes when I watch, I wish that boulder had not budged. When my flesh was tortured and my mother's tears fell, I believed it would erode the rocks in human minds. But I hadn't counted on their thoughts like drowning pebbles, sinking in a hard skull cave just beneath the skin. Love sealed within forever, not knowing light. The third day never comes.
12/22/2008 6:22 PM
Alegria Imperial wrote:
You’re right Jendi in that reading a poem makes pleasure possible when it sparks something within you. Thank you for this posting. I was following the lead of this poem below that was writing itself when I had thought of visiting your ‘bloc’. Serendipity! I got an answer to my plea--a silken poem that weaves a truth (‘Love sealed within forever, not knowing light.’) thus, covers one more hole in my punctured skull more than stuns and could render me paralyzed as the one I apparently hanker in this poem.
Plea for a poem
write me a poem words to breathe in even if only whispers as shouts have turned the air into a hail storm
write me some rain my heart crackles in the draught longing for words drenched in thought to sip in the dark
i yearn for verses snipped from flame tips words that dance the fire of fallen angels saved from their march on dying coals
write me a song cadenced in sunsets tympanis of words rising off the hum of meanings drums have flattened
give me back poems shredded spirits birth in caves midnights cleansed poems howling wolves hankering for stars divine Reply to this
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