Sonnet to Robin – 

Robin is silent, not peaceful, a stretch where life is quiet, uneventful.

We always live backwards, sometimes frontwards, but rarely, 

…to prune the roses, to puff a fag or mow some grass, but there are no voices.

Listen to the silence.….to a possum, a squirrel, a sparrow, a bark,.…a jay’s flight with blue sparks.

Staring at the balcony, melancholy grows. inaction reigns, patience sighs. 

We just rarely talk, we always know, while we come and go, but always know,

… from our big houses, into our coaches, to ourtiny boxes.

Listen and smell..…a blue spell, clear breath,…..a hawk peeks with lure onto the urban green pasture.

Disease in our throats; broken uneventfulness that will reach our souls. 

Fucked up year, some say; to embrace nature and life in unknown ways.

Nature dominates, we still don’t understand, we fear it late to stop and stand….

Standing in the balcony, hopeful I feel, spellbound and expectant as Robin blooms green

Still uneventful we go, just nothing important, a gale of humane hope.

:

Right when the panic started, I was tempted to follow Berlioz’s steps with the opium, however my senses told me poetry is not hallucinatory or psychedelic but more about the powerful use of the word. How these entangle, twist, embrace each other, intertwine, bend and blend to create meanings that, maybe turning fantastic, are always premonitory of our deepest thoughts, feelings and forms of identification with reality.

Poetry composition feels to me like a puzzle of meaning; puzzling with the meaning and putting it together. I find it a state of the mind; embedded thoughts that concealed in the mind blend together turn into meaning. Seeking those intimate meanings is what gets the exercise so wonderful. 

Dams and Alpinism. I like the dams that are built in cold mountains and use bell-mouth spillway systems. Are very scary but at the same time are fascinating. The closer you are, the more fearful they get; you want to approach the edge but its spiraling waterfall torrent is so powerful that can suck you into the bell mouth. But you cannot help it, curiosity drives you closer and closer to that fear. Writing is a similar experience. A spiral flow of thought fed by rhythm, music, meaning. It absorbs you into the abyss but you cannot avoid it because you want to explore it to wherever words may take you. Curiosity gets you into the bell mouth of words and meaning.

Once I wrote a narrative poem about a Woodpecker, a Centipede, an Armadillo, a hair ringlet, and a roll in the hay. All together create a wonderful rhyme where the words and their meanings hug each other and entangle in a way that is almost graphical, like a hieroglyph. But the beauty of it is that you cannot reframe it in English or other languages. Poetry, its meanings, and the tools it uses to express itself become very unique to each language, and so does thought. The beauty of this sonnet exercise to me has been the creation of thought in a foreign language through the skill of twisting, bending words and finding its nuances to have them dance together in a brief sonnet to create meaningful thinking. Thank you!