and rereading
and reading yet again...
turning and examining the multiple contexts...I am struck by how each reading is colored by the light reflected off the screen...the brightness of the afternoon...the mystery of the darkness...the clarity of the morning light
There is an undeniable intimacy to these poems...I am curious as to the nature of "the thing that loses its skin in the water" is it amphibian? is it metamorphic? can it survive in two worlds? both the water and the land...
I feel a resonance with "lovers seeking sanctuary"...I have sought places to be free to express my hearts desire...they are sacred spaces...to lie beneath the blue sky to smell the breath of the green plants crushed in moment of passion....of life in its most primal expression...
but I am puzzled by
"The poison of revenge gone native in the grass"-I feel that the key lies within this rare, oddly specific line...I have my own understanding of "gone native"- I am of mixed ancestry and my attempts to reconnect to my various cultural practices have been met with this derisive phrase...but what could David Marriot intensions have been...I decide to Google it and discover
Gone native -
1. being the place or environment in which a person was born or a thing came into being: one's native land. 2. belonging to a person by birth or to a thing by nature; inherent: native ability. 3. belonging to or originating in a certain place; indigenous: native dress. 4. born in a particular place: a native Chicagoan.
but what I saw was the merging of longing to belong with the shame of vulnerability... the birth of a new entity from this union...I thought of colonization...of the devastating effects of manifest destiny... the slave ships... the children born of this collision...
Now all of us here on this land that we continue to rape and exploit...
many of us tangled bloodlines of colonizer and colonized...where is our home?
Where may we be free to love? where may our passions ignite? What place are we giving to our children? When will we belong? Can we accept our history? Can we embrace the future that we deserve?
and the raping of the Earth continues...the seduction of greed...the base nature of man...
and yet nature embraces us...she will sustain us if we will but strip our selves of the evil of which we were created
Hi Lora! (Like you said to me today, I can't get enough of you, xoxo)
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking about your comment, "There is an undeniable intimacy to these poems." And it's so interesting because my post was all about the perpetual sense of distance evoked by the speaker, and yet, you're so right, that there is an intimacy that's there, too. It's almost like the entanglement of the images and meanings within the poem constitute a kind of intimacy - like the poem is so intimate with itself that nothing is singular or separate or distinguishable. I also really appreciated the questions that you asked, and how you see the poem as a kind of merging of both hope and vulnerability, devastation and possibility, consequence and inquiry,
Your deep look into "gone native in the grass" was really eye opening for me. It was a phrase I had overlooked in the poem, and yet you connected it to so many ideas. You picked out what you called "evidence of illicit relationships" which I also noticed, or sensed, but was not at all able to articulate! There are so many things that hint at this... the child looking for the "enemy", the father. The pain and shame of this particular birth. The lost child. Thank you for such a thoughtful and compelling response.
ReplyDeleteLora, what a great journey in this blog and how brilliant you are to go to the troubling words and find out a way that it contributed to the larger thrust of the poem. Also to be enclosed in the intimacy of it made your observations particularl. Nicely done
ReplyDeleteE
yes. I really appreciate your dive into the consideration of "going Native." This phrase left me prickly feeling and I'm thankful for the investigation and yes, the ideas of incest and illicit relationships came up for me as well-children born out of these unions, the bonding of colonizer and colonized. Thank you! look forward to your future writing
ReplyDelete