Ngwatilo

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As You Say (Not Without Sadness), Poets Don’t See, They Feel

By Karl Shapiro

As you say, (not without sadness), poets don’t see, they feel. And that’s why people who have turned to feelers seem like poets. Why Children seem poetic. Why when the sap rises in the adolescent heart the young write poetry. Why great catastrophes are stated in verse. Why lunatics are named for the moon. Yet poetry isn’t feeling with the hands. A poem is not a kiss. Poems are what ideas feel like. Ideas on Sunday, thoughts on vacation.

Poets don’t see, they feel. They are conductors of the senses of men, as teachers and preachers are the insulators. The poets go up and feel the insulators. Now and again they feel the wrong thing and are thrown through a wall by a million-volt shock. All insulation makes the poet anxious. Clothes, strait jackets, iambic five. He pulls at the seams like a boy whose trousers are cutting him in half. Poets think along the electric currents. The words are constantly not making sense when he reads. He flunks economics, logic, history. Then he describes what it feels like to flunk economics, logic, history. After that he feels better.

People say: it is sad to see a grown man feeling his way, sad to see a man so naked, desireless of any defenses. The people walk back into their boxes and triple-lock the doors. When their children begin to read poetry the parents watch them from the corner of their eye. It’s only a phase, they aver. Parents like the word “aver” though they don’t use it.

——

This is a re-publish I stole from somewhere I shall not say, but can if you must know. I hope you don’t mind, Karl Shapiro, one day we may workshop together.

I don’t think I need to say anything beyond the piece, unless I were to write a new piece. I wish it was on a great big poster of every poetry event in this city, this poem, then maybe- but that is too much information. Read it and read it again.

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Try To Praise The Mutilated World

by Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Stumbled upon this piece today when i was reading up on Mr Zagajewski. The piece was published on the back page of the NYTimes on the 20th of September 2001 or thereabouts, just 2 seconds after 9/11. Quite a beautiful poem i think, gentle like, clear, as sad as the real world is but sort of not sad at the same time. hopeful, joyful, Life-ful. It made people feel better, even as it allowed them to feel what they were feeling. well, i don’t know all that, but if that’s not what happened for Adam’s poem, well, then, that’s what I want to happen for Ngwatilo’s poems. there I said it, i have an ego.

It is what I want for my pieces, the ones that people will still want to read and talk about when my voice is croaky, when my eyes have a bunch of wrinkles around them; when I am not there. gentle-like

More about the author: http://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/poem-try-to-praise-the-mutilated-world/

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Get well

When you are well we can walk in the rain
pretend we are young again, that we are willful
enough to splash in puddles. We don’t have to do it really.
We can just smell the rain and the trees and skulk in the black cotton soil-

Come home with me.

(June 18 edit)

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Seeing you

I will try not to look at you funny
I am not perfect either. But when I do
it’s really a question I want to ask
God or Fate. But it’s good to see you.

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Dream house

i saw the house today,
a quaint two bedroomed,
with enough space
for a dinning and lounge.

The bathroom loo had a wonderful flush,
a properly old school bowl and tank.
And the tub, in its own room,
imagine a bath without the knock
of a belly full of pee rushing out.

Outside was a garden of fully grown trees,
no matter they give nothing to eat.
The peace that rests in these five units,
in a neighbourhood where men build fifty
to tower high. Bliss is knowing that whatever
they dream, peace remains intact here.

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Daddy, No.1

every thing he says i recall
because he repeats himself
and tells tales as if the action is at par
with the Matrix or Genesis.

everything he says stays
especially my name in vexed tones,
he’s ready to leave,
but i’m still dressing, selecting earings,

So he roars my name into the walls,
no, he’s changed, now he drives radiowaves
into everything, dialing my cell to say
“Let’s go” in frustration.

i am not all bad. I listen,
and call out a response we’ve ritualized
to mean, “soon.” He doesn’t believe me,
and i am at once ashamed and amused.

Daddy misbehaves also, and i throw my fit
in turn, “Why didn’t you take your insulin?!”
i want to know, hurt and annoyed. Feeling
two things at once beats feeling one.

He shrugs, he thinks, “Surely what is one less
needle in my skin today?” “Life,” I say,
“I need you alive and well.” He shifts, changes
the subject, I’m glad we spoke at all.

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Love poem no.1

Leaving is not an option
because of you, because of me.
Your face belongs to me,
when you shave it wrong I wince
as you itch. Your belly I accept
as I do your cavities, and I promise to nag
about the virtues of seatbelts.

Leaving is not an option because I got your tire
fixed today, because you hug like a solution.
Because you get me fried chicken
when I’m sad, hungry or tipsy,
because you know how to talk to Kenyan Police
and ward off nasty old men. Because I make you
eat vegetables so you will live a long life with me.
Because you don’t get the logic but eat them anyway.

We will not leave each other although the girl
in Costa Rica wanted you, and you her, because
you came home to me unscathed, regardless.
We hold on because you told me everything and I
did not panic, although listening was hard
and she won’t be the last. I will stay because you prove
you are mine. I will take my antibiotics dutifully
for you when I am sick, because I accept that me ill
is worried knots in your belly, as you depressed
is calm focus in mine and all the wrong words on my lips.
I will believe in you because of that look in the dark
of your uncle’s car, long before a promise, a threat or a kiss;
because you love me more anyway, and I am safe.

(April 30 edit)

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Good.

Friday came and went without music,
the sky cracking, without thunder.
Even the long rains were missing;
they would have helped us invent
a memory of God dying, gratitude.

But there were no clouds, the sky
did not darken. Last year’s Friday
could not be recycled. How does one
remember a thing that happened
two thousand years ago, in another
culture, in another place, in a moment
when death was good?

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So we decided to plant trees,

to plant bluegum trees because they would sell to the power
company, because it would help the environment, to plant,
even if we replaced the ones God planted - destroy them -
to make farms for profitable fashionable green things, like maize
and coffee, neglecting and forgetting the plants we grew before,
the trees that just breathed while gnarled and twisted
but kept us and our rivers. We believe that God doesn’t mind
anything we do, as long as we pray and fast by design
or hunger; as long as we plant trees and work the land, careless
to study it, as if we live on the edge of eden.

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Writing Prompt: (Wise, Edible) Wart hog

He looked good enough to eat,
we could cook him slow on a spit
with an apple in his mouth
the horns on either side hanging pineapple
rings to offer playful sweetness.
But who would slaughter such innocence,
when chicken and goats exist here for food?
Who knows how many the warthog saves in prayer?
He kneels to eat as if thanking his maker for life and food,

worshiping. Has he learned from example or have his bones
told him. The rains are near, perhaps he offers thanks
for that also, while we complain at its delay,
and defile the land endlessly as only we know how.