Sometimes you can find the seed of a new poem in the wreckage or rescued lines from an earlier one that just never worked. That's what this little ditty grew out of on the first anniversary of Obama's inauguration, January 20, 2010. The first lines about the aspirin factory were in the early drafts of my poem "Six Degrees" about a trip on the Coast Starlight from Albany, Oregon, to Salinas, California. And the image of the destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas? Well, they've been dying to find themselves into a piece of writing for years.
This isn't necessarily a profound or amazing creation. But I do think it is something not nothing—the merging of musings of a woman's middle age with memories of her earlier, racier life and the continuing storm of destruction that rains down, round-the-clock and unceasing half a world away. And I'm glad some of these phrasings, these images, these bits and bobs of syntax have, at least for now, found a home -- here's a fragment:
Doldrums
Once she’d have traded the tides
for a touch to shiver her gangplank,
dip her below the equator in a waltz.
Now the gibberish has run its course.
Dynamited to dust: the face, the legs,
mud-straw of the world’s tallest Buddha
in the cliffs above Bamiyan. Half this globe
away, she’s an ocean with sudden storms
and light, unpredictable winds.
Photo: The windows in the bedroom of the solar teahouse where we stayed when we went to Maui in February 2007. A great spot on the earth near the town of Haiku and home to the Huelo Stupa, too.
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