Insha’Allah
For some reason I believed that I had shared Danusha Laméris’s Small Kindnesses on Poetly before, but it turns out that I had only made a reference to it, like I’m doing in this post too :) Perhaps, some time in the future, but for today I share another poem by her, a poem that I’ve been mulling over in these times.
Danusha Laméris is a beautiful, beautiful find. Her poetry is sensitive, deeply felt and it unravels simple things and everyday wonders with great care and slowness. When I think of her writing, another name that immediately comes to mind is Naomi Shihab Nye. While writing this post, I was thrilled to find a very recent Poetry Foundation - “Poetry Magazine Podcast” episode that hosts a conversation between the two poets. In the early part, Nye asks Laméris to ready any poem, and she chooses to read this one. I’m sharing excerpts from the interview (You can listen to it in entirety - and please do! - here) as introduction to today’s poem - Danusha Laméris’s Insha’Allah.
“In a lot of ways poems are ways of salvaging time. and I wonder if that isn’t part of the fascination right now, and the interest” (DL)
“All the subtractions are making me love what’s left even more” (NSN quoting DL in an email)
“I do think about how our time has been pared down, but somehow each moment is more exquisite. And it’s been a mystery.” (NSN)
“It’s a poem I wrote when I was waiting to see actually if my book was going to be chosen, and then it was - by a certain Naomi Shihab Nye! … I was thinking a lot about waiting, and what it is to wait and not know. Because of that, and because of a lot of other things. so…” (DL)
<She reads the poem>
“Thankyou. I love that poem. It’s a poem my Palestinian grandmother - who said “Insha’Allah” all the time - even though she could’t read or write…but all the things you mentioned - the lemon juice, the rice, the hope - those were all elements of her life. But when I hear a poem like that and think about this past year - all the worries people have countered… so many worries…. a thousandfold worries about everything; and how ‘God willing’ could become an even more crucial kind of rudder, or handhold on sanity. It’s as if that poem got bigger since I read it many years ago. (NSN)
Poems expand and shrink! (DL)
Yes, our lives got smaller and a poem got bigger. No, But we need that. I must say Insha’Allah has come into my mind more than ever this past season (NSN)
I’ve read a quote, and I can’t track down who said it - “The Soul craves complex, beautiful and meaningful imagery.” …That’s what we get from our dreams a lot, isn’t it? But it also comes with religion - beautiful, complex, meaningful imagery, so I can see how that creates attraction for having a faith. But I think also towards poetry, too. For me that is kind of my reservoir of that. (DL)”
