After Dawrish: Other Fragments
From The Butterfly's Burden
David Bowie once did the Proust questionnaire. His response to the question: what is your idea of perfect happiness? Is simply gold. His answer: reading.
Reading is ultimate for me. It’s an expression of love, interest, peace, care, and curiosity all at once. I would even say it is even my favorite shared activity. I adore it profoundly. It is its own love language.
And this is all to say that I have loved reading Darwish’s poetry (linked here). It is my opinion that he may be one of the world’s best poets. Of course, it is not every single poem of his that made a mark on me, but his poetry does what I don’t find very much in other contemporary poetry. His work is a step closer to offering wisdom; whereas, in other work, I find mere creative reporting of things.
I have already mentioned his work to you before. It is this post. When I say that poem alone was an earthquake. How can I describe the rest of the book?
And this is the spirit of this letter. I simply want to share a few more moments that delivered a blow to me, that I have not fully processed, but that I adore.
I recently wrote about the kind of intended slowness and pull-unto-holding that art can bring. Poetry, specifically, is like this. Reading poetry is not about speed but slowness. No one is impressed that you read a book of poetry in 20 minutes, even though it is possible, but it is meaningful that a book of words that don’t even use the entire line they’re on took you 3 months to read.
Two things before you read:
I don’t think I’ve share this before, but it might be helpful to know that the symbol “|” signifies the line break in the poem. The intent is that you will read each segment twice, once as the full sentence indicated by the end of the quote or end of the sentence and then again as divided by the line breaks.
Poetry is a vertical art; it dives into moments. Fiction, for example, is a horizontal art; it drives across time.
Here are some quotes that stunned me, broke me pause, or felt like a gift.
Here is stillness
I am who saw his tomorrow when he saw you, “Sonnet II”
Patiently the river asks for its share of the drizzle | and, bit by bit, a tomorrow passing in poems approaches | so I carry faraway ‘s land and it carries me on travel’s road, “Sonnet V”
You have no night, when you saunter | toward the night alone. You are here | breaking time with your look., “Maybe Because Winter Is Late”
It’s love, my friend, our chosen death | one passerby marrying the absolute in another, “Jameel Bouthaina and I”
In Siege, life becomes the time | between remembering life’s beginning and forgetting its end…, A State of Siege
I will scream in my solitude, | not to wake up the sleeping. | But for my scream to wake me from my imprisoned imagination!, A State of Siege
Writing wounds without drawing blood, A State of Siege
A passing tomorrow precedes me. I am the king of echo, “You’ll Be Forgotten, As If You Never Were”
I say: How is this my concern? I’m a spectator | He says: No spectators at chasm’s door, “I Have a Seat in the Abandoned Theater”
May the rest of your day feel different. May you carry forward something from here even further.
More soon,
Trevor
Now-reading affiliate links:
The Disappearance of Rituals - Byung-Chul Han: Amazon | Bookshop
Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader - Herminia Ibarra: Amazon | Bookshop
