Sometimes it tires me, this being a poet. This being a scholar, a reader, a thinker, a dreamer. Some of us get paid for it along the way, some of us don’t. And why would we pay you, asks the world sternly?? What. Do. You. Do?
Well, I sigh… I sigh a lot. I don’t raise my woebegone hand to my weary forehead while I sigh, but I do sigh. I got into trouble for sighing long years ago, when I was fifteen and country grieving, grandfather grieving… in a new country, whose countrymen, strangely, considering our four hundred year long history together, didn’t seem to know anything about mine!
And that’s just the India element. Never mind the Arab and Persian ancestry, which is not mere ancestry, it is embodied presence. Today I thought a thing: I may have written a thousand poems in my life. If only poems were given the weight of novels or songs, no one would consider me a wastrel, a ‘what do you do with your life?’ sort of person, would they? A ‘but can you make money from/ how much do you make?’ question that hangs over the poet trying to poet in a world with no time for poetry except at funerals, when all there is left is poetry. Until the conductor of the orchestra moves on.
Into this sighing poeting grieving life of pseudo intellectualism (I am not a doctor or even a doctoral candidate), come places of refuge. In my case, refuge used to be books - to write in and to read - and then degrees - the essays that made up each one, and then this blog, begun seventeen years ago. And between then and now, the storms of social media and the pandemic and all along, the ticking of the clock of tech.
Art saves us all, but when art takes its toll of the artist, it is only ever nature that comes to the rescue. Though the land is parched and scorched across the earth, the colours, the scents, the 'flora and fauna' to quote a phrase my brother recently threw in, is our true resting place.
Have you read ‘How I Became A Tree’ by Sumana Roy? I attended a lecture by her on Disobedient Essays… disobedience is something I am a little too good at… ah well! One can attempt to be better… I just celebrated my birthday. The old year and I hath parted ways, onwards (and inwards) to the new!
