The poem I share with you today is from an anthology of ‘poems from the middle east’ selected by one of my favourite poets and anthologists, Naomi Shihab Nye.
I think often of the moment of conception - that divine birth of meaning and brilliance. The familiar metaphor of light enters unbidden, and refuses to leave. I let it be, at the risk of cliche. Then, there’s the moment of arrival, of chancing upon beauty, of finding the sudden burst of expanse after days of obscured sight, as Keats described when he read Chapman’s Homer.
However overwrought the metaphor, I cannot help but retrace my steps, along the ridge of epiphany, sit quietly beside its raging torrent, and muse.
Kaisser Afif’s poem treads this familiar path, but stops me in my tracks with the stonefaced rudimentariness of its insight. These two experiences that he describes - of writing poetry, and of reading it; of letting art touch you, and of the elusive moment of creation - these two experiences have led me by the hand through uncertainty, silence, and, of course, solitude. They have cradled my astonishment, and unravelled the anxiety of this crazed time. I am happy to meet a poem that says it plainly.
Before I share it with you, let me be so bold as to share two poems of my own, about writing, about the distilling of thought into form (because I find that the poems speak better, without the baggage of explanation).
Both use light, I apologise.
These are sides, to Afif’s poem about the bridge, and about poetry.
Walk with me
***
writing
if there's one thing i've learnt
from the ghost that roams around
seeking the fertile loam of a quiet mind,
it is to never come in the way
of the light that streams in
through a door that I had forgotten
to shut
photosynthesis
before the simmer
of a life
plotted in unwieldy relief
slips through skin,
skin drawn from under
the fingernails
skin that has learnt the perseverance
of leaf
skin that knows to bend light
into the sound of beating
into word stripped of memory
and infused with sight
before the lightning
and the lightening
this moment waits
through the waking dream-
a constellation of yesterdays,
this moment
curdles
with the gradual burden
of meaning, an unfastening
of rivers, a loosening of strings
and then the clang
of coins hitting the ground
the bang
of sunlight streaming in
through an open door,
and wind.
