Garden Song

I am home now from a journey to Galway, Ireland where I was asked to speak at the annual Galway Arts Festival.  Perhaps nothing is more gratifying in this life than to meet people who have understood the measure of our own hopes.  In literature classes this sweet transfer is called "the imagination" but how can that erudite term even begin to suggest the pepper corns and the peat moss fire that warm songs and poems?  We live in the arts like house cats in sunlight.  Now a young German film maker, Sven Werner has made a short film based on my memoir Planet of the Blind and I had the privilege to be present as his work debuted in Ireland.  Sven has taken the impressionistic imagery of my book and transfered it into a visual river of light, color, dancing words, beams of strange and haunted light,: all while simultaneously allowing the film's viewers to hear the language of the original book.  I am mindful that as a writer I have indeed been lucky to find lyrical and discerning readers both at home and abroad.  I am grateful to Sven Werner for his ardor and belief in my writing.

Home again, and a little tired from the long flights I was again privileged to have my wife Connie share with me a posting on Blue Girl's blog that conveys her appreciation for the poetry of my late friend Deborah Tall, as well as the assortment of origami swans and paper airplanes that appear on this site.  Go to her posting please.  There is a song included there that conveys human love and the warmth of waking that will bring tears to your eyes.

The Irish poet Yeats once said famously that a poem should click shut like a well made box.  He was of course referring to the formal aspect of poetry.  There should be some precision to the making of a good poem.  But I have always felt that Yeats had this backwards.  A poem should be a well made box that springs open and sends us into the sunlight.

Garden

I was "of" the sun.
Then I was "of" the rain.
Then I woke and saw I held two roses in my hands:
I pressed the white one to my eyes,
And the red one to my heart.

S.K. 

Comments

[blue girl]

Thank you for the link and thank you for this...

"...the assortment of origami swans and paper airplanes that appear on this site."

That was sweet.

I wanted to write a post that conveyed how special I think you both are. I really do. Not to be too ooshy, gooshy...

:)

But, I really do. And I'm so happy that we have connected.