21 January 2005

I never thought to write a poem about the tsunami.  I’m sure that plenty have.  In some recent explorations of poetry sites I’ve come across two separate competitions asking for post-tsunami poems.  And no doubt both will provoke some real McGonagall horrors.  If there is a sort of golden protocol regarding poetic response to an event of overwhelming significance it has to be that the writer must depict the local, the personal, the microcosmic in such a way as to allow the reader to extrapolate the general.   This poem wasn't designed either to attempt to represent the totality of an event or to slyly provoke the reader into a realisation of truths behind the symbolism.  But it did come in some sense from my reactions to the tsunami. Or more accurately from Sam's reaction to the tsunami. In a comment on a post of mine concerning the aftermath of the disaster she used a sentence that has stuck firmly in my mind. She wrote: 'The earth does not know who walks upon it'.  I've pondered the implications of that resonant little sentence a good deal over the past couple of weeks, particularly in the light of recent data concerning the direct effects of global warming on the polar icecaps.   Beyond being in the '70s rather taken with James Lovelock's eloquent propositions about the nature of the Earth as a sentient organism - the Gaia principle - I have little sense of our planet as being much other than 'like an apple whirling silently in space'.  So Sam's characterisation of the Earth as not knowing who walks upon it &, by extension, continuing to pursue its purposeless functions untrammelled by any apprehension of the presence of humans appeals to me greatly.  Whether one is considering the appalling after effects of a tsunami or the early stages of a local gale, one's overwhelming awareness is of an elemental force that owes nothing to human agency either in terms of its origins or its impact & of our fundamental powerlesness in the face of it.     WIND AT NIGHT   I twitch the curtain, fit my face into the breach. Trees moving   their shoulders like they sense trouble in the gathering wind;   midnight leaves running for cover; a black bag flapping, scampering   like a set-free shadow. Even the light is blown into glittering rags   that stream from the empty branches. All of this wrapped   in a long voice that has no words and speaks only   of itself in this world through which we pass, weightless and invisible.   pic from: dnd.gazeta.ru/ dnd_wind.jpg 11:38:20 PM    Mmm? []

© Copyright 2005 Dick Jones. Last update: 01/02/2005; 22:41:45.