A bewilderment of birds

Sheetal, my sister, keens the felling of a tree in a recent post. There are trees and there are trees; if we live long enough we learn that they are all impermanent. Wilful, deliberate destruction is hard to fathom and natural tragedies difficult to endure, but there is some perverse comfort in that these patterns of loss and reaction are universal and fractaled.

And so, Nemerov again.

Learning by Doing

They're taking down a tree at the front door,

The power saw is snarling at some nerves,

Whining at others. Now and then it grunts,

And sawdust falls like snow or a drift of seeds.

Rotten, they tell us, at the fork, and one

Big wind would bring it down. So what they do

They do, as usual, to do us good.

Whatever cannot carry its own weight

Has got to go, and so on; you expect

To hear them talking next about survival

And the values of a free society.

For in the explanations people give

On these occasions there is generally some

Mean-spirited moral point, and everyone

Privately wonders if his neighbors plan

To saw him up before he falls on them.



Maybe a hundred years in sun and shower

Dismantled in a morning and let down

Out of itself a finger at a time

And then an arm, and so down to the trunk,

Until there's nothing left to hold on to

Or snub the splintery holding rope around,

And where those big green divagations were

So loftily with shadows interleaved

The absent-minded blue rains in on us.

Now that they've got it sectioned on the ground



It looks as though somebody made a plain

Error in diagnosis, for the wood

Looks sweet and sound throughout. You couldn't know,

Of course, until you took it down. That's what

Experts are for, and these experts stand round

The giant pieces of tree as though expecting

An instruction booklet from the factory

Before they try to put it back together.



Anyhow, there it isn't, on the ground.

Next come the tractor and the crowbar crew

To extirpate what's left and fill the grave.

Maybe tomorrow grass seed will be sown.

There's some mean-spirited moral point in that

As well: you learn to bury your mistakes,

Though for a while at dusk the darkening air

Will be with many shadows interleaved,

And pierced with a bewilderment of birds. 

Because I wanted you to address me

Because I sometimes wonder in wonder

Because I sometimes think I know

Because some things are sometimes perfect

Because other things are almost true

Sometimes I think I may have found a poem

Sometimes else I know I have

Sometimes the world wakes up together

Sometimes I’d falter so nearly there

I’d like to know of wonder and world

I’d like to behold the perfect rose

I’d like to know if it is sometimes true

That there is a line between poetry and prose?

Because sometimes your love of a thing will make you conjure tricks to edge closer to it. Howard Nemerov’s poem “Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry” is such a thing.

For your pleasure and mine –

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

--Howard Nemerov

Test post

Will this set right the problem?

Coerced into mourning

The Chief Minister died today. It was a dramatic death and somehow more disturbing for that. I was detached to begin with but got predictably somewhat sucked into the whirlpool of media-whipped misery. I was quite content to give up my whole morning for the occasion. I sat through the search and salvage operations and all the speeches of the important leaders and the reactions of the state. But around noon a strange thing began to happen. All the relief channels -ones I had been alternately flipping to when a news anchor had repeated a sentence about two-dozen times to a background of infinitely looping three second visuals - began to present blank screens one by one. It seemed strangely like an all-systems failure in a dying man. When all but the news channels were taken off air, I realised of course that they were being blocked. Now, I’ve never really resisted a two minute silence in my life and wasn’t about to do so then.

But that was then and this is now. It is evening, nay dusk. The day’s work is done, sadness has held its limited sway, and now I find I want my usual pleasures. I want my TV. But no, they inform me over the phone, the cable operator’s union has decided, they say, that it ain’t seemly. We are to continue like this for a whole day. I find that my empathetic benevolence has evaporated. This isn’t a channel that has decided to withhold its programming out of policy; now that would be its prerogative. But for an intermediary to stand between me and what is my right because it thinks it has the wherewithal to police my social conscience! I think it is coercion, and like most people, of all things it makes me want to rebel!

I will not be recommended an acceptable quantum of grief nor be forced to participate in a public one.

Apni tho ab tamaam huyee kayanaat-e-gham

Do ashq the jo deeda-e- tar se guzar gaye!

I will feel as much as I do, express or not as I choose and seek my relief where I will. Fie on those who would try and choose for me!

And till such time as the channels don’t come on I may as well sulk in misery.