#160: I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than you
Dear reader,
I’m still not sure how it’s mid-August already but well, here we are. How are you holding up? Have your pandemic coping mechanisms changed? I’ve been writing down internal changes I’ve been feeling in 2020 versus 2021, and it’s odd to admit but I find 2021 a lot harder to work with. When the pandemic started, there was a sense of novelty, the newness of self care, cooking every meal and keeping your home clean. We missed our friends and family. We dealt with the vulnerability of enforced distance and solitude. We fought to survive.
2021 has been such a blur. I don’t even remember my New Year resolutions. Everything feels so tentative and uncertain. We’re still in and out of lockdowns. Vaccine drives are finally a reality but death counts continue to rise.
I’m just not able to shake it off.
So I turn to poetry and art, the only way I know for things to feel somewhat manageable. Poetry can often be messy but it’s almost always true and beautiful in its rawness. As Thomas Lux writes in the poem Irreconcilabilia, ‘No matter blessings, rage, or rest: / the dead stay dead.’ Since reading the news about the Taliban in Afghanistan since yesterday, I just want to cry, protest, protect, write. I found myself searching for poems that trigger difficult feelings in the reader that aren’t easy to articulate .
Poetry Corner
First thought after seeing you smile by Warsan Shire
come with every wound
and every woman you’ve ever loved
every lie you’ve ever told
and whatever it is that keeps you up at night
every mouth you’ve ever punched in
all the blood you’ve ever tasted
come with every enemy you’ve ever made
and all the family you’ve ever buried
and every dirty thing you’ve ever done
every drink that’s burnt your throat
and every morning you’ve woken
with nothing and no one
come with all your loss
your regrets, sins
memories
black outs
secrets
come with all the rot in your mouth
and that voice like needle hitting record
come with your kind eyes and weeping knuckles
come with all your shame
come with your swollen heart
i’ve never seen anything more beautiful than you.Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong by Ocean Vuong
After Frank O’Hara / After Roger Reeves
Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty into.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind through a wind
chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.Missed Time by Ha Jin
My notebook has remained blank for months
thanks to the light you shower
around me. I have no use
for my pen, which lies
languorously without grief.
Nothing is better than to live
a storyless life that needs
no writing for meaning—
when I am gone, let others say
they lost a happy man,
though no one can tell how happy I was.Irreconcilabilia by Thomas Lux
No matter what you do
you cannot hold it long
or take it back again.
The sky, the barely blue
blank sky, the tight moss-bound
houses of sleep, will call.
No matter how hard you love,
that love will pass, will pass,
your friends imparadised,
gone, lost. The summers blaze,
the years, and what you know
grows dim, hurt by the dark.
No matter child, or wife,
or art. The river bends
and bends again seaward.
The soft lip-click of worms,
a spider's feet across
a leaf; you see, you hear.
No matter blessings, rage,
or rest: the dead stay dead.
You walk, spine alive, you kneel,
you lay your ear down on
the ground. Does God live there?
Does God live anywhere?Different Ways to Pray by Naomi Shihab Nye
There was the method of kneeling,
a fine method, if you lived in a country
where stones were smooth.
The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,
hidden corners where knee fit rock.
Their prayers were weathered rib bones,
small calcium words uttered in sequence,
as if this shedding of syllables could somehow
fuse them to the sky.
There were the men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.
Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white linen
to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.
When they arrived at Mecca
they would circle the holy places,
on foot, many times,
they would bend to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing mystery.
While for certain cousins and grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily,
lugging water from the spring
or balancing the baskets of grapes.
These were the ones present at births,
humming quietly to perspiring mothers.
The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,
forgetting how easily children soil clothes.
There were those who didn’t care about praying.
The young ones. The ones who had been to America.
They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.
Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones.
They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,
for the twig, the round moon,
to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.
And occasionally there would be one
who did none of this,
the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,
who beat everyone at dominoes,
insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,
and was famous for his laugh.Boundaries by Lynn Ungar
The universe does not
revolve around you.
The stars and planets spinning
through the ballroom of space
dance with one another
quite outside of your small life.
You cannot hold gravity
or seasons; even air and water
inevitably evade your grasp.
Why not, then, let go?
You could move through time
like a shark through water,
neither restless or ceasing,
absorbed in and absorbing
the native element.
Why pretend you can do otherwise?
The world comes in at every pore,
mixes in your blood before
breath releases you into
the world again. Did you think
the fragile boundary of your skin
could build a wall?
Listen. Every molecule is humming
its particular pitch.
Of course you are a symphony.
Whose tune do you think
the planets are singing
as they dance?
Recommended Listening
Dreaming with Jeff (sleep music by Jeff Bridges. Sit back, close your eyes, and nod off.)
Piece for Dance by Mary Lattimore
Full Performance - Eydís Evensen
I Don't Envy Yesterdays - Holy Hive
Halley’s Comet - Shantanu Pandit
Links of the Week
How to Find Silence in a Noisy World
Does diagnosis help or harm? Or, why we name our demons (Such an important read)
Getting Unstuck by Sunday Soother (PW: Soother)
When Things Feel Scattered (I didn’t realise how much I needed this piece from Zen Habits today)
What to do with our COVID rage
5 Dancing Men (A classic Sesame Street short based on the work of street artist Keith Haring). Watch it below:
The Sealey Challenge
This month, I’ve been reading a poetry collection a day as part of The Sealey Challenge, a call to action to read 31 poetry books or chapbooks of your choice in 31 days. I’ve been sharing my favorite short poems from each day’s reading.
You can browse through them here:
Day 1: All You Who Sleep Tonight by Vikram Seth
Day 2: Scattered Poems by Jack Kerouac
Day 3: A Necklace of Skulls by Eunice de Souza
Day 4: Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds
Day 5: A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver
Day 6: The Poetry Pharmacy by William Seighart
Day 7: I Speak for the Devil by Imtiaz Dharker
Day 8: Puffin Book Of Poetry For Children: 101 Poems by Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo
Day 9: Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods by Tishani Doshi
Day 10: Newspaper Blackout by Austin Kleon
Day 11: Mappings by Vikram Seth
Day 12: These Errors Are Correct by Jeet Thayil
Day 13: Liminal by Douglas Reid Skinner
Day 14: behind the horizon beyond by Kala Ramesh
Day 15: When God is a Traveller by Arundhathi Subramaniam
Day 16: The Man with Night Sweats by Thom Gunn
Currently reading: Alone and Not Alone, a chapbook by Ron Padgett
Ending this newsletter with some good ol’ Ava wisdom from her newsletter bookbear express:
“If you’re forever looking around for validation, you’ll never be able to make anything that’s completely your own. Because you don’t even know what you think. You don’t know what is good and beautiful outside of what is culturally dictated to be good and beautiful. We believe that desire is mimetic, but we forget that the people who inspire real desire are always people who are redefining it—who give us something new to look at, allow us to escape groupthink. There’s nothing more powerful than separating signal from noise, spotting a phenomenon no one else has recognized yet. But to do that you need your own separate thoughts.
So: cultivate your independence. Run your own race, knowing that the destination is yours to choose. Don’t enslave yourself to people who think there’s only one way to be right. Your job is to do what you like on your own terms. Your job is to keep going, to eke out good day after good day.”
-Run your own race, Ava
Wishing you inner peace and forgiving days ahead,
Rohini