My favourite poet, Emily Dickinson, died on this day in 1886. Here I republish my earlier tribute to her.
Little Miss Emily Dickinson cocooned in white silk in her sitting room.
Dreaming a web of words around her then gathering them back into her pocket again.
Oh why doesn't she open a window? And let the poor things fly?
Perhaps she fears that like the spider if she gives birth she'll die.
‘Creation’ by Meats Meier
Once I’ve birthed a poem and stopped staring in its eyes, anxiety starts feeding on the empty space inside. I don’t know how it got there, or if another ever will; I’ve no idea what made it grow – God knows it wasn’t skill. Its herald is a rumbling from the caverns of the mind, which builds in its intensity to a seismic shifting of disquiet. Faults and fissures open up, misshapen truth is born, squalling and demanding to be healed and fashioned form. The trick is not to think of it, don’t call its name, or stare; (allow it its dark silence to grow strange and unaware). Only once it’s almost whole you take a sideways glance - shuffle some stray words around, find harmony in chance. Then when every note has fallen, exactly where it should, withdraw in awe and wonder how what’s been made you never could.
‘Blue’n Red’ by Michael D. Edens
Little child with eyes like darts please hurl them at my hardened heart; perhaps they'll lodge in fissures there explode and blow me wild and bare. Little child with face like corn field spreading wide as eye can see - allow me to drown my dark dolor in your anesthetizing sea. Little child with mind like nascent cloud on volatile day, teach me how to dissipate and gently fade away.
‘Woman at the sink’ by Jacqueline Fahey 1959
What a tame beast she has become, idling in the paddocks of her family's unmade beds and unwashed dishes Circumambulating, endlessly, the dead heart of this domestic poppy field; pausing with lost purpose to pick up some thing here and artfully place it there - in abstract justification of an involutionary existence. Look! See how she is wiping grime from surfaces and framing frozen photographs and harmonizing dissonance and feeding feeding feeding (those who will never be sated) While deep inside, covertly she is self-restrained by sedatives and spurred to life by stimulants and lured to the end of day by the promise of the darkling hours in which to unfurl her monstrous might and play - (what desperate play!) O what a noble beast is man and O what a cowed beast is woman - tethered by the whim of reproduction to her most nominal self .
Poems need to percolate
they need to gather power;
to
drip
through
the mind
one precious
gem drop at a time
each word a world of
connotate
and
crystalline
and
distillate
wild potent potions men create
at dark
after dinner,
or in the dead of winter,
in a cabin in the snow
warped by winds
and cawed by crows
and curdled by the treacherous roars
of heaving hearts and minds
at war which hound man to his knees
and yet, only serve to render,
the poems’ glow more tender;
each pinpoint paper lantern land
an oasis of elixir,
to salve the souls of we who seek
solace inside the storm.
Strange what happens when you hear the news and find yourself gazing in underwater slow motion at all that up to this point was your life. The verandah you spent the day inexplicably painting green, the doll's house carefully constructed in the childhood room, the vase placed just so to welcome him home, the treacherous photographs lining the fairytale hall all roll gently in waves and send ripples out into the future so that it instantly - rearranges itself, and what was to be is now not. Still. So still. Clear. Cruel. Dazzling. All pierced by a screaming voice (mine I think) a crying child (ours). She's tugging my leg trying desperately to pull me back through the doorway of her already fractured childhood before it snaps shut. (Oh sweetheart, I wish if only for you, that I could rewind and keep playing my part, but it's gone, you see, there's nothing left to return to because it was never there, it was a lie.) Then in the background I hear a whimper (that's you) the sound funneling me back into the - now of your face - pale and quivering, like a mollusc without its shell. Naked you stand, your truth pried open before me, waiting for the knife of my rage to cut - and in a moment of horrifying clarity I realize that you have been shucked! Your exposure is indecent (and somehow brave) you burn in the light of my gaze and are finally free. (It is only much later I dare to consider that perhaps, so are we.) Now, carefully, so as not to perpetuate harm, I take her small hand and we tip-toe away, abandoning the spent husks of past selves behind us, trailing all our dark painful roots along with us like bloody testaments to these stillborn lives as we pull further, further, further, still pulling today.
Underwater Photography Exhibition by Andreas Franke
Her mind was strong but now it's gone adrifting out to sea and barnacles and sucker fish are living there for free. Her thoughts, like eels, are slippery they shimmer in the wet, enticing her to hook their tails with language she'll forget. Life must feel so unnerving without handles to hold on - a mind that's lost its labels is a maze you can't escape from. Trapped in watery corridors with no words to let you out, identity is cast away Her treasures sunk throughout.
