AntivirusGy 19: Celebrating Eve and dancing with God

 

Celebrating Eve 

We started talking about Toni Morrisson and wondered if she had written any poems and then found Eve Remembering in which the poet imagines Eve saying "I would do it all over again:" ...

and we were in awe that well.. Eve would have no shame for the 'sin' of eating the apple. 

We had a discussion about innocence and sin, and whether it would be better to be innocent than face life's problems.. a discussion which got emotional at times and a lesson on how poetry can evoke strong emotions in some people while well.. nothing in other people..

We agreed that we didn't understand 'The Perfect Ease of Grain' , and tried to work out what it meant and put it down to one of those things like the beautiful clip from Wilson Harris shared in the Afterword of the Chapter & Verse: Wilson Harris organised by Moray House Trust which we might never understand.

The discussion of understanding continued with the  The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats shared by a teacher who writes poetry. The teacher learend of this poem from Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart .

We liked the line 

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity" 

and thinking of how much is needed to reverse this in the current days.

We wondered what the second verse meant, using Google to help us understand about the beast slouching to Bethlehem and deciding that evil exists with good.

Becoming the ocean

Another person shared 'Fear' by Kahlil Gibran and we all enjoyed it. We agreed how the opening 

"It is said that before entering the sea 

a river trembles with fear " and the closing

"The river needs to take the risk

of entering the ocean

because only then will fear disappear,

because that’s where the river will know

it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,

but of becoming the ocean."

are powerful lines and we talked more about understanding fear as an instinct of survival and trying to understand this fear.

The image of the ocean is the opening of Audre Lorde's Litany for Survival  "For those of us who live at the shoreline" and wondered about the acceptance of 'we were never meant to survive' to get us through these times..

And we talked about persistence, two persons recalled "Drive the Nail aright boys" from their mothers, which others had not heard before.

Dancing with God

One person shared a poem from the 12th century German mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg "I cannot dance o Lord".. a reminder of the faith that gets some people through tough times and of the intense devotion of the  mystics.

The first the virtual 'Come Take a Poem'..was held for World Poetry Day 2021 to  bring people who not too much into poetry together with those who like poetry and for people who don't normally read poetry to well.. read poetry. 

Stephane Bowry had challenged us to not wait until the next World Poetry Day and since Covid19 made the virtual, real -  we met up every two months since that first event a year ago to read poems and  talk about poems in community. Some people read their poems for the first time in public. I read more poetry - wrote some haiku - as a result of Covid19.

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

Featured Image by Anastasia Zhenina on Unsplash