thinking today that

The Abnormal Is Not Courage

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers,
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
The bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best.
It was impossib1e, and with form. They rode in sunlight,
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
And the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
Not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
That is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

Jack Gilbert

There are two lines in this poem I disagree with. The first:

It is too near the whore's heart

The equation of sex work with emotional dishonesty or fraud is a totally lazy, trite metaphor. It's been done a million times, and more relevantly, it's just plain wrong. As in factually untrue. Heart i.e. emotional involvement, is not a requirement of transactional sex, any more than it's a requirement of domestic labour. Disappointing when an otherwise brilliant poet fails to think through something that basic.

The second line is:

The marriage, / not the month's rapture.

Yes and no. I get what he's trying to say. But in a lot of lives, it can be an act of genuine courage to take the leap out of the socially-sanctioned lifetime commitment, if it's become a form of soul-killing bondage. To dive into "the month's rapture" - the space of desire and delight and excruciating, terrifying aliveness that may not be sustainable.

But I love:

Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.

I repeated those lines frequently to myself in the rehearsal phases of Migritude. As I reached for:

The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.

in what I was trying to do, to be, on stage. And I would die happy, if I felt, in 2 or 3 decades time, that I've logged:

The beauty
That is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

Jacaranda Time

Art by Deamer Dunn

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.

Hands N Air

Digital art, created by a reader of this blog, Deamer Dunn, from a photo taken of me in Durban, by Victor Dlamini