AntivirusGy 14: Poetry, paper boats, trees, killing death..

 

Paper boats

"Do you think the paper boats on the river are us and life"?  Stephanie Bowry asked us. A woman had shared a poem she wrote after making paper boats with her son for the first time and putting them on the Berbice River.  

We talked a bit about rivers, currents, destiny and whether or not we were paper boats and how Caribbean people had moved against the currents. 

One woman said she heard the joy of the child folding the paper boats and putting them on the river.

Poetry

In March 2019, I folded newspapers into hearts and stapled poems on them to share at a Groundings event,  telling people to "Come, take a poem."

People on the avenue were surprised.. they hadn't read poems since leaving school (primary school even) . 

I hadn't discussed poetry either since the English B (Lit) exam in June 1986 when I am sure I did not get much marks for the questions about the poem. And since March 2019 I have not really engaged much with poetry apart from listening to people read them for various reasons and thinking 'how nice' as if I would know the difference between a nice poem and a not nice poem.

And so, Covid, can't go on the road.. event organised online using Jitsi to think of the road where anyone could pass without having to register. World Poetry Day seems a nice day to do the thing.

 A woman who recently lost her parents in a car accident shared Khalil Gibran's On Joy and Sorrow in advance of the meet up.  

My school friend realised that she had not taken her poems books from Guyana to the USA. She wrote a poem about having poetry while not having poems - she wrote the poem as she joined the meet up.

Killing death..

Stephanie Bowry is 74 years old and has performed twice during March, in New Amsterdam. She told us of performing her poem 'Time to kill the enemy" at the funeral of a dear friend who died from Covid-19. "I wore a black robe, had my gun.. crawling on the floor.. looking for death to kill" . 

The other space she recited was in an 'empty lot, with bushes.. across from the TV studio' for International Women's Day. She recited both poems for us.. the square screen not the front of the church at the funeral, or the empty lot with the bushes but her voice making it easy to imagine the performance.

Trees

A woman in the almost spring time of the UK via Jamaica said she didn't want to put on her camera as she wasn't dressed properly. We laughed told her no problems with dress code. She turned on her camera and from that borderline of winter and spring she shared the poem Instructions on Not Giving Up

Instructions on Not Giving Up
Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

 We talked about how the poem rewritten for the Caribbean would probably be about the cycle of seasons. We talked about how people cut down trees because the trees 'shed leaves' even though the trees give so much. 

'People are too fussy about dry leaves on the grass'.. . I think of the tree growing in yard.. woman who comes to collect her weekly dues from me telling me 'you gah fuh cut down dat tree because it gun grow wild' and I don't know how to say that I growing that tree in protest at the cutting down of the trees opposite to build a concrete structure to house people who working in the oil and gas industry..

Not giving up..

"You have to explain why you choose the poem" and I was not sure what to say about why I choose Mahadai Das' Return Me to the Fire

If I should ever die
Return me to the fire
If I should live again
Return me to myself.
Heartfire,
flame in hurricane-lamp
Outside, into this storm.

We talked about what this poem might mean... without much conclusion.

I shared( more like read word by word without paying attention to the ideas and commas and so on)  Audre Lorde's A Litany of Survival and we talked about the last lines, about silence and how we keep silent 

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive.

In that spirit of breaking silences, a woman who said she had come because she was fast and she would have been the woman standing up on the road watching us do this .. she reached into Poems of Resistance by Martin Carter and read Letter 1. 

None of us had heard it before '..wait, yall lived through Burnham and never know Letter 1" And the reader explained.. there is the spirit there, the hope for better for generations to come though well 60 years after the poem was written from prison.. well maybe another generation to come..

I am looking for Letter 1 online and realised that Martin Carter had written For Angela Davis. 

 Angela Davis's had just given keynote address at the 18th Walter Rodney Foundation Symposium. Does she know that Martin Carter wrote a poem about her?

Looking up from the lighthouse
As the 90 minutes approached, Stephanie Bowry shared the poem she brought for us .. written after she went up to the top of the lighthouse. and in addition to looking down, she looked up and realised the vastness around. We talked about the  abstraction of ourselves from well, ourselves, about our insignificance generally and about how the beacon on the lighthouse is now on top of the Marriot.

One woman shared that she felt revived by the discussion.. "from the joy of the child with the boats, the hope of trees greening and Carter writing from prison'

Stephanie Bowry  gave me permission to quote her. She had one condition. That we don't wait until World Poetry Day to meet up again and come and talk and read and share poems.

So we will meet again in May.

(AntivirusGy is a collection of ramblings on things which have changed since Covid 19 entered our vocabulary)

Feature image photo by Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash