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True
to Life
All
week long I’ve been worried about poetry.
Worried because, on Saturday night, we’re having a poet come
to the church where I am the pastor, and I’m afraid people
won’t come.
Why? Because it seems that most people, when asked about poetry,
say they don’t like it.
I don’t understand this. OK, I guess I understand it if they
were force-fed Ezra Pound at an impressionable age. Or if
they were required to memorize “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
as part of sophomore English class. (“Yea, slimy things did
crawl with legs/Upon the slimy sea.”)
But it just isn’t true that you can substitute a cup of corn
syrup for every love poem or that just because it’s called
a poem, it’s snooty or dense or both.
Instead, it seems to me a poem is the most reliable place
to go to find the truth, if the truth is what you’re after.
I’m not sure why that is, but I think about it a lot. Poetic
language just tells more truth than regular words.
In what I do for a living—lead worship services in a local
congregation—most of what happens is poetry, in one way or
another.
If you’re going to try to talk about what’s in the marrow
of the soul, you don’t write up a spec sheet; you try to conjure
an honest image with the words at hand.
Last Sunday a woman was telling me about what it felt like
when she was a kid to see the blue and red candles flickering
through the darkness of her local church. That image alone
said more about a sense of the holy than any kind of explanation
could.
A good poem is like getting the right correction for astigmatism:
Now you can see fearlessly.
The poet who’s coming to Grace [Lutheran Church, in Niskayuna]
on Saturday, Taha Muhammad Ali, writes poems like that. They
make the reader see fearlessly.
There’s nothing hard to follow about his poetry. They are
clean and straightforward, as though he thinks a wasted image
is a wasted moment. As though to remind the reader that life
only has so many moments.
That’s what I like about his poetry. That and the way he writes
about living in Israel as a Palestinian. He was born there.
In 1948 his family fled to Lebanon. He came back the following
year and has lived in Nazareth ever since. He has made his
living for decade selling souvenirs, and still owns a souvenir
shop with his sons.
As a poet he is completely self-taught. He doesn’t argue a
political position or aspire to personal heroics. He simply
writes about living in a place and at a time when intolerable
options face everyone. And he writes as if he wants his witness
to be understood. Maybe it’s because his lines are short and
his images direct, or maybe it’s because, even in Arabic,
his style is unencumbered and clean—but Ali speaks truthfully
in a world of colliding truths.
Lovers of hunting,
and beginners seeking your prey:
Don’t aim your rifles at my happiness,
which isn’t worth
the price of the bullet
(you’d waste on it).
What seems to you
so nimble and fine
like a fawn,
and flees
every which way,
like a partridge,
isn’t happiness.
Trust me:
my happiness bears
no relation to happiness.
This isn’t Ali’s first visit to the area. He was here a year
ago, touring with the Hebrew poet, Aharon Shabtai and their
translator, Peter Cole.
At that time, Cole’s wife, Adina Hoffman, wrote in The
Boston Globe of Ali and Shabtai’s visit to the Robert
Frost homestead in Middlebury, Vt.:
Taha
surveyed the isolated expanse and grinned in his lopsided,
yet somehow centered way.
“What
do you think, Aharon? ‘Good fences make good neighbors’? But
there are no fences here and Frost had no neighbors.”
We all laughed, though, for an instant that great green view
darkened slightly. In a few days we’d have to go home—back
to the land of the fences.
Ali’s translator, Peter Cole, will be with Ali at Grace on
Saturday. A poet himself, and a major translator of Hebrew
poetry, Cole lives in Jerusalem and runs Ibis Editions, the
not-for-profit Israeli publishing company that published Ali’s
first book.
Cole’s work translating Ali, as well as his presence with
Ali at Grace, is a part of his larger commitment to provide
at least a glimpse of hope into the picture of turmoil in
the Middle East.
Maybe the obvious question is—can poetry do that? Provide
hope, shed light, offer solutions, broadcast pictures of real
life? There’s more than a hint of an answer here in these
lines about friends meeting unexpectedly after 40 years:
You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
“What
do you hate,
and who do you love?”
And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes
of my surprise,
my blood rushing
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I
hate departure.
I love the spring
and the path to the spring
and I worship the middle
hours of morning” . . .
. . . And here you are
asking—again,
it’s absolutely preposterous—
I recognized you
but you didn’t recognize me.
“Is
it you?!”
But you wouldn’t believe it.
And suddenly
you burst out and asked:
“If
you’re really you,
What do you hate
and who do you love?!”
And I answered—
my blood
fleeing the hall,
rushing in me
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I
hate departure,
and I love the spring,
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you wept,
and flowers bowed their heads,
and doves in the silk of their sorrow
stumbled.
—Jo
Page
For
information about Saturday’s reading, call 372-0244 or e-mail
jopage@graceniska.org
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