Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.
Poems can be about many things, sometimes physical things, or events or people, or as in Thursday’s poem by Hayden Carruth, things and the relationships of things. One thing poetry does well, I think, is give us a medium for describing abstract things by anchoring them with a comparison of some kind, or giving a descriptive example.
Today’s poem by Indian poet Tishani Doshi is an almost imagist take on strength and stability. On holding the world together. It makes me think of another line from A.E. Houseman’s Epitaph on an army of Mercenaries:
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and the earth's foundations stay;
First a few comments on the poet. Tishani Doshi was born in 1975 in Madras, India, and received a Masters’ in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S.. She has published ten books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and has won numerous awards for her writing. She is an unusually multifaceted individual, with a significant presence as a poet, author, journalist, dancer, public speaker, biographer, blogger, and cricket commentator. She advocates on environmental issues and on the violence against women, persistent issues in India, and elsewhere. For those into mindfulness, she has an interesting take on time in one TEDx talk “The Luxury of Slowness,”and a poetry reading at another. Both combine her thoughts on dance, and on words.
Today’s poem, The Day We Went to the Sea is available online in several places, including her website, http://www.tishanidoshi.com/. It happens to be an unnaturally windy day:
The day we went to the sea
mothers in Madras were mining
the Marina for missing children.
Thatch flew in the sky, prisoners
ran free, houses danced like danger
in the wind.
The consonance is very strong (note all the wave-like m’s and w’s), and how things are paired - mining the Marina, danced with danger, gives added emphasis.
Amid the chaos and the uncertainty, the narrator observes one point of stability:
I saw a woman hold
the tattered edge of the world
in her hand, look past the temple
which was still standing, as she was -
miraculously whole in the debris of gaudy
South Indian sun.
The full text of the article is available at theotherpages.org, or at The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.
