#166: Ten poems on Memory on a Mellow Monday
Dear reader,
I found myself only looking for poems on memory this morning. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been creating mind maps for myself, first in my head, then my journal. I find it fascinating that different people remember things differently, how everything has a memory, even touch.
In my mind mapping experiments, I often try to revisit old homes I have lived in, walking from room to room of the memories. Some of these are probably inaccurate and reimagined, though there’s no way to tell the difference between fiction and reality. Since music is such a strong time portal, I’ve also been listening to songs and pieces I once loved and had forgotten about, letting the familiar tunes take me back to the first time I heard the melody, mapping out associations and feelings. Letting the memory take me where it wants to go.
Poetry Corner
Poetry, of course, is laden with memory. Dense, unforgettable passages of time, captured in verse. So instead of just five poems, I decided to go all-out with this newsletter and picked ten rather beautiful poems on memory for you to read and enjoy.
Soup by Timothy Walsh
If enlightenment were a soup,
it would have lentils in it,
lots of lentils and garlic,
slow-cooked with carrots and tomatoes,
with a garnish of fresh parsley.
If pumpkin soup with ginger and nutmeg were a story,
it would tell a tale of olden times
where people lived amid burnished autumn light,
caught up in bittersweet loves and losses,
never fully realizing how quaint and beautiful
were the lives they led.
Other things that could be soups
are memory, music, Christmas and twilight,
For nostalgia, onion soup is best,
since root crops remember.
Can you see how we slurp up enlightenment in spoons?
Can you taste the story in your soup bowl —
the characters, the landscape, and all that happens?
Spoons are shaped to both fit a mouth and carry soup
the way our minds are shaped to anticipate and remember.
In September, if we all put up a few quarts of potato-leek,
it may carry us through till spring.Water Memory by Jackie Gorman
The bottom untouched by sunlight,
heart shrinking down
as though the future isn’t real.
Nothing to hold on to.
Musty smell of the lake,
fish and forgotten hooks.
Boats on the horizon.
Just the water before thought.
My hook snagged in the want of this world.
A silent urge to be like water,
flowing yet strong enough to hold a ship.
I draw a fish in my notebook.I Belong There by Mahmoud Darwish
I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to
her mother.
And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.
To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf by Jorge Luis Borges
At various times, I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study, while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.
Used up by the years, my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.
Then I tell myself: It must be that the soul
has some secret, sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing
circle can take in all, can accomplish all.
beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.Little Bird by Jennifer Chesnut
There’s a little bouquet of a bird
with a softly sloping belly
on top of the telephone pole again.
Every day I start living
with this silhouette of freedom
taped to the fridge of my mind.
I say thanks:
to the birds, to the trees, to the one world
of which we’re all part of.
Even when I forget.
Even when the dreams draw me down
to the deep cellars of sleep,
bound in boxes of memory,
sore to the soul of the bones.
How disfigured the mind can become
from the constant exposure to the high heat of greed,
the whole house on fire!
So I wake and I sit with my notebook and a pen.
I wait and watch for the soft-bellied birds
who rise and flit every morning
with seeds in their beaks
and molecules of praise tucked under their wings.
What else could make them fly?
Sure, they have hollow bones
and carry the perfect DNA for joy.
I listen too to their pure calls.
I remember them later when the day gets dark.
Watching well is part of the necessary work.Lost in Plain Sight by Peter Schneider
Somewhere recently
I lost my short-term memory.
It was there and then it moved
like the flash of a red fox
along a line fence.
My short-term memory
has no address but here
no time but now.
It is a straight-man, waiting to speak
to fill in empty space
with name, date, trivia, punch line.
And then it fails to show.
It is lost, hiding somewhere out back
a dried ragweed stalk on the Kansas Prairie
holding the shadow of its life
against a January wind.
How am I to go on?
I wake up a hundred times a day.
Who am I waiting for
what am I looking for
why do I have this empty cup
on the porch or in the yard?
I greet my neighbor, who smiles.
I turn a slow, lazy Susan
in my mind, looking for
some clue, anything to break the spell
of being lost in plain sight.Dried Roses by Robert Creeley
“Dried roses…” Were these from some walk
All those years ago? Were you the one
Was with me? Did we talk?
Who else had come along?
Memory can stand upright
Like an ordered row of stiff stems,
Dead echo of flowering heads,
Roses once white, pink and red.
Back of them the blackness,
Backdrop for all our lives,
The wonders we thought to remember
Still life, still life.Non-attachment by Nguyen Ba Chung
Let’s gather every fragment of our memories,
it’s all that we have at the end of our life.
Warring days and nights, showers of sun and rain –
what’s left of love?
Let’s gather what remains of our memories,
it’s all that we have at the close of our life.
Warring days and nights make us wonder:
Should the bundle we gather be empty or full?What Remains by Collin Kelley
We arrived in Paris on a rainy Sunday,
I remember this now,
as I lift the veil you shrouded me in,
made me complicit in your indecision.
While the others walked under umbrellas,
we lay on opposite beds in the Marais,
our hands reaching across the chasm,
my fingertips tracing your open palm,
every line a dead end.
We made love through a litany
of favorite things: films as foreplay,
music for kisses, books our orgasm,
a rush of words safe between hard covers.
We should have been covered in sweat,
sticky with the unspoken,
a tangle of limbs and lips.
We are those people in an alternate world,
where hallway voices hold no sway.
I remember this now: your eyes
before the door opened, broke the spell.
Your hand moving away, all the lines
suddenly on fire, a map gone to cinder.
This ephemeral day, even the afterglow.Shaking Hands by Pádraig Ó Tuama
Because what’s the alternative?
Because of courage.
Because of loved ones lost.
Because no more.
Because it’s a small thing; shaking hands; it happens every day.
Because I heard of one man whose hands haven’t stopped shaking since a market day in Omagh.
Because it takes a second to say hate, but it takes longer, much longer, to be a great leader.
Much, much longer.
Because shared space without human touching doesn’t amount to much.
Because it’s easier to speak to your own than to hold the hand of someone whose side has been previously described, proscribed, denied.
Because it is tough.
Because it is tough.
Because it is meant to be tough, and this is the stuff of memory, the stuff of hope, the stuff of gesture, and meaning and leading.
Because it has taken so, so long.
Because it has taken land and money and languages and barrels and barrels of blood.
Because lives have been lost.
Because lives have been taken.
Because to be bereaved is to be troubled by grief.
Because more than two troubled peoples live here.
Because I know a woman whose hand hasn’t been shaken since she was a man.
Because shaking a hand is only a part of the start.
Because I know a woman whose touch calmed a man whose heart was breaking.
Because privilege is not to be taken lightly.
Because this just might be good.
Because who said that this would be easy?
Because some people love what you stand for, and for some, if you can, they can.
Because solidarity means a common hand.
Because a hand is only a hand; so hang onto it.
So join your much discussed hands.
We need this; for one small second.
So touch.
So lead.
Recommended Listening
Links of the Week
Watch: Taste (A woman loses one of her senses and embarks on a personal exploration of memory)
Jane Goodall on How to Change Minds (Such a lovely interview!)
“Drawing is looking, and looking is loving” -Wendy MacNaughton (Thanks for this, Ananya!)
Letterheady, an online homage to offline correspondence; specifically letters
Currently reading: All About Love by bell hooks
“…many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
―bell hooks, All About Love
Such a beautiful, powerful book about the art of loving, justice and healing. Essential reading in these polarised times we’re in.
Ending this newsletter with this Poorly Drawn Lines comic that feels like home.
Let the light in,
Rohini
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