my first villanelle

Art by Deamer Dunn

has just been accepted for publication in the next issue of international poetry journal, A Hudson View. Maybe that proves I can do formal western verse forms after all :-).

From my latest mailing to my list (which you can join at Contact Shailja):

JACARANDA REFLECTIONS

Every year, for about six weeks over October and November, the jacarandas bloom in Nairobi. Clouds of breathtaking purple beauty, every flower a dancer in motion, against a backdrop of foliage, sunlight, rain, sky.

Jacaranda season is indelibly bound up with my memories of year-end exams. My high school driveway was lined by a glorious avenue of jacaranda trees. Before I entered the exam hall, I breathed in the trees with every sense sharpened by sleep deprivation, by acute concentration. When I emerged, giddy with exhilaration or despair, I let the extravagance of blossoms fill me, drench me, release me into the world again.

For over a decade, I've harboured a serious crush on the villanelle , ignited when I read Marilyn Hacker's marvellous memoir-in-poetry, Love, Death And The Changing of Seasons. I never got around to writing a villanelle myself. Partly because I told myself: "You don't do formal western verse forms." Partly because the nature of crushes is that you're scared to actually approach the object of your affections ;-).

But there's something about being home in Kenya right now. Jacaranda season, upcoming elections, 2008 bookings, creative turning points, the making of Part 2 of Migritude, wanting to clone myself to be on three continents at once, uncertainty about what comes next, all swirl around me. And I find myself reaching for the challenge of structured rhyme schemes. For the deeply satisfying discipline and music of five tercets that culminate in a quatrain.

It doesn't quite re-order the universe. Or provide a miraculous roadmap for the next two years. But yesterday and today, the lines of my first villanelle, thrumming in my body, made me intensely happy. I leapt across puddles, dodged splashes of muddy water from moving cars, paced them out along the highways and backroads of my city.


JACARANDA TIME

I'd choose to meet my world in jacaranda time,
its shifting dappled light across my face
that tessellates the blossoms into rhyme.

Rain churns Nairobi roadsides into slime
littered with purple flowers like torn lace.
Five-week countdown to election time.

As if this villanelle were the sublime
re-weaving of our fractured, looted space,
I trudge gluey mud, I grope for rhymes.

Kalonzo, Raila, Kibaki tena (1) - pantomime
of sumo wrestlers threatens to efface
thirty-six million silenced (2). When's their time?

And maybe this is love: hope wrapped in grime.
Relinquish all the might-have-beens. Embrace
each tiny possible, each less-than-perfect rhyme.

So I will choose this lilac song. Now I'm
unfurled to small epiphanies of grace
in bloody struggle. Joy, in jacaranda time,
her lips curved, gentle, round the missing rhyme.


(1) Kalonzo, Raila, Kibaki - candidates vying for the Kenyan presidency

(2) Approximate population of Kenya, 2007

"JACARANDA TIME", COPYRIGHT SHAILJA PATEL, 2007. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


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