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A leap across words
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These poems hope to do more than mouth sympathy to the tsunami victims
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Photo: AP
EBB AND FLOW There's no predicting the sea, one moment a fearsome assassin and the next a puppy licking the feet
To those of you farther off/ and tempted to explain this/ as earthquake or karma/ can you recognize the riddle/ one awakens to/ with a scream/ words won't explain?
The Riddle, Peter Dale Scott
The poems that instantly strike a chord in Only the Sea Keeps, The Poetry of Tsunami are those that simply admit that some horrors are beyond words. Like Luisa Rossina Villani would ask in The Astronomer Behind His Eyes: How do you explain water wider than a forest/ to children who trust in trees? Or like Sabine Pascarelli would sum it up in Thinking of Tsunami: There is a need to take life/ more seriously./ The humming insect flying/ towards the morning sun/ and the bird swallowing it/ have got it... / Nothing else to explain.
The book itself, though, is an effort that sets out with the belief that narratives and verses can address the "deepest emotional and intellectual longings" and can play a significant role in the process of healing. Two weeks after the tsunami hit South Asia and swept away almost a quarter of a million people, three poets — Judith R. Robinson, Joan E. Bauer and Sankar Roy — decided to rally the international poetry community.
The website
The trio formed poetsforthetsunamivictims.org and the entries came from poets of varied backgrounds and nationalities. Selected poems from the contributions made to the site are now in the collection Only the Sea Keeps (Rupa & Co., Rs. 195). Dedicated to the victims of the disaster, the proceeds from the sale of the book will go to the Library Disaster Relief Fund, affiliated to the American Library Association, and Mercy Corps, through Poets for Humanity, a non-profit organisation floated by the editors. Judith says that they "plan to stay intact as an organisation which can act if events require a poetic response in the future".
In the collection are poets who enjoy international recognition just as there were those who are making their first effort at writing verse. We have in the collection a journalist from Port Blair, a man working on a "project on ethical wills in a hospital", yet another who is "a lawyer by day and a poet by night", the editor of a litblog on "poetry on current events", one who has studied Indonesian martial arts for 30 years and even a "certified poetry therapist".
The poems are as diverse in their approach to the disaster. Even as there are some which take on the near-impossible task of reconstructing the disaster scene (some interesting ones even play with the line and sound patterns as in Tom Dolton's Tsunami), there are others which employ the power of understatement to drive home the enormity of it all. Ben Hartlage says in The Land is Delivered Again to the Sea: I walk empty-eyed, searching for the living./ I have no heart left to hate the sea. In Sonnet After Tsunami by Alamgir Hashmi, all that's left on the beach is sepulchral silence and a lone child who has lost everyone in the catastrophe. He is desperate for something to break the silence: Birds so quiet what's speech/ for? A throaty sound of this/ one pebble on the beach./ Roll it again,/ roll.
Equally powerful are poems which say nothing at all about the tsunami directly. Peter Huggins in Yard Work After The Tsunami, for instance, writes about a man sawing trees and making posts to edge his yard in the tsunami-devastated landscape with a deceptively matter-of-fact tone, only hinting at how there are hawks around to reap even disasters.
There are also poems which speak of the nature, which is completely unfathomable, almost schizophrenic. David Ray says in Tsunami Triptych: Tread gently,/ my friend, for the earth is almost all air/ and air is fire and the water may yet/ astound those who fear only hell fire and the gods. In I Had To Go Back by Bimal Sharma, the sea looks like an assassin and burglar, sends people scurrying on the beach for evidence of crime, but finally, and quite incomprehensible, comes like a puppy/ to lick my feet again/ with your blue tongue.
This writer's favourite in the collection is Joan E. Bauer's Without Ceremony that even questions the comfort zones from which we view distant disasters, flipping through pages of a newspaper. She writes: I distrust the poet writing for a cause,/ posturing, as when/ I'm in the beauty shop, glance at the mirror, hoping/ to catch my good side — / After some moments, I turn past the photos/ of the dead children to the Saks ad, or/ "How one airline is changing everything." She concludes with: Not all blows crush the bone, some pass through,/ and if we listen,/ we catch their echo. What the photos don't tell us/ is how to love/ when there is no tsunami.
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A connected world
One of the three editors of Only The Sea Keeps, Judith R. Robinson, tells MetroPlus how poetry can connect across the seas and make a difference:
"Events, both natural and human-made, trigger deep emotion, and everything is contemporaneous. Many artists, including poets, feel an obligation to address tragic circumstances, to offer a context in which to deal with what life hands us. The great T'ang Dynasty poet Li Po (701-762) wrote about grief in the context of the deaths of millions in the An Lushan disaster; think of the Confucian Odes on disaster and war; think of Pablo Picasso's Guernica; think of Primo Levi and the European Holocaust. Obviously, the list goes on... "
"We live on one finite planet. In the devastation of the tsunami, the earth lost more than a quarter of a million of its people; shock, grief, despair and questions follow for all of us in this connected world; poets attempt to address the hard questions as fully as they can. We can also hope that the poetry might someday soon appear in translation to other languages."
BAGESHREE S.
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