I fear going near dogs. My father has two, one a large German Shepherd and another a Mini Pinscher. My younger sister constantly pets them, showers them with affection in such proximity I wish I could do but can’t. So I watch them often from afar, propped up on my chair, feet huddled together in case our pets escape from my father and sister’s hands.
During June this year, I was still afraid of going near dogs. But for weeks I walked around our village streets, aware that stray animals are rampant in the area, especially during early dawn when roads are sprawling with dogs and cats and not cars. I would wake up around five a.m., put on my hoodie, plug in my earphones and walk, hoping to glimpse a sunrise alone, when no one is outside but me. When the world is asleep and the animals are the only witnesses to my moving. I hoped to be a part of space, so empty yet brimming with hope for a coming day after dawn. Like a rest in the middle of a song. Like silence preceding a conversation. It’s this attempt to be halfway there, somewhere in the quietness of what’s in between, that I find myself constantly returning to.
And I return to poetry now, which is another way to come home into that stillness and encountering it. Here is “Leaf”1 by Sean Hewitt:
For words are forms of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak
with the weight of it.
For each tree is an altar to time.
For the oak, whose every knot
guards a hushed cymbal of water.
For how the silver water holds
the heaven in its eye.
For the axletree of heaven
and the sleeping coil of wind
and the moon keeping watch.
For how each leaf traps light as it falls.
For even in the nighttime of life
it is worth living, just to hold it.
Something so earthy yet otherworldly, how this poem evokes that quietude found in nature and writing. I sit on a pause just from the first line alone of words as “forms of grief / grown from the earth,” and that it is “worth living, just to hold it,” that light from which is trapped by leaves falling in the night. Lines like these contain me in brief cessations as if each space wants to let us breathe in word after word. And in poetry, a beginning of mysteries formed, a choice of withholding so that one may come to notice what’s lived more.
“Silence” is not explicitly said throughout the poem, but often, I think poetry requires us to come face-to-face with its stillness. Perhaps this is why listening to poems being read is like coming to peace for me, because each halt is deeply felt, which is so deliberate and conscious that even the breathing spaces feel like it’s become a part of the work itself. It is worth living, just to hold that brief stop. To take notice of nature as museums of age and “altars to time.” And how the moon is “keeping watch” through all of it, even right now.
The Japanese word “ma” is described as “the space between the edges, the space and time in which we experience life.”2 The combination of the words door and sun makes it seem like a doorway for sunlight to peek through. Not just in poetry and writing in general, “ma” is part of what’s around us and what’s within us—that occasional desire for an absence of movement and/or of sound, and how stillness can be a resting place for all of us. I’m reminded of the ways in which we can find meaning not only in filling up the spaces in our lives but also in their emptiness—in what is yet to be shaped and given form.
A lily for you,
Czar
Galinggg mo czar!! So proud of u! <3 keep it up🫶🏻
-J. Bs Psych 1A