The bright end of my voice

For International Women's Day, this from Persian poet Shadab Vajdi. 

Wait for Me 

And I become alive again
Outside the confines of my body,
Beyond the misery of want,
Among the fruit-laden branches
Within a moment,
Itself begotten by the sun;
And in the shelter of a bush
That carried the pure fragrance of love
To the boundless plains;
And my eyes,
Not a pair of mute spheres,
But flames of quest;
And my hands,
Two guiding sails
Speeding towards the green land of lovers;
And my soul, my heart
Singing,
singing.

Wait for me
Along the blue line of the horizon
That leads the silver path of the moon
To the glittering fountains of stars,
And by the waterfalls of dawn
At the moment when the sun rises
And draws the threads of light
From one branch to another,
Carrying them like grains
Deep inside the nests
Where the chicks,
With desire for light and sky,
Are cheeping,
cheeping.

Wait for me
At the bright end of my voice
That from above the mysteries of the galaxies
Flows down to the earth
To be absorbed by the buds of growth
And to give the slumberers of the gardens
Tidings of sunshine and life. 
Wait for me;
I will become alive again.

Whatever a moon has always meant

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Today a poet with a sublime creative disregard for rules: e e cummings. His poetry often looks whimsical or childish for its breaking of rules, but it's often, as here, terribly beautiful and full of wonder. Enjoy this bit of unpunctuated ecstasy. 

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you 

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) 


Spelling trouble

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In year 2, spelling tests were not uncommon. One day, introducing one of these tests, and doubtless to take the sting from it, my teacher said it was ok if we spelt the words wrong. Accordingly, I deliberately misspelled every word on the test with, as I remember, some glee. Later in the day, we were in the library having a story read to us when I was summoned back to our classroom for an interview with the teacher. Disappointed and terrified, I made my way back alone through the deserted school grounds. My teacher asked with concern why I had spelled wrongly words he knew I could spell correctly. Through my sobs I answered ‘You said we could!’  

At the time I was mostly grief-stricken that I had misunderstood, and that I had missed the end of the story. Looking back, I’m intrigued by this episode and what it was that motivated me to misspell. (And I wonder what my teacher made of it.) During the test I think I enjoyed the creative act of coming up with novel ways to spell known words; experimenting with - had I known it - morphology. Perhaps some part of me enjoyed the act of impersonating a child who knew less than I did, inhabiting for a time the world and intelligence of an other.  More than this, I think I enjoyed the freedom of what I (mistakenly) thought was a momentary reprieve from the whole scholastic morality, from the knife-edge between accuracy and failure that so dominated our days and separated us into impenetrable categories of ‘good’ students and bad ones. For once, it seemed, we were offered the freedom of artists and the communion of brothers. Who could resist such grace? Not I, though I paid for my error with bitter tears. And I never found out how the story ended. 

On earth as it is in heaven

James Wood had an interesting piece in last week’s New Yorker about Rick Santorum’s objection to environmental conservation. Radical environmentalists, Santorum has claimed, act as though man were here to serve the earth instead of ‘husbanding its resources’. Wood’s angle is that the candidate sounds more like a fiery eighteenth-century puritan than the Catholic he is, and he dusts off a stack of influential protestant voices as the tradition from which Santorum’s ideas come: Bunyan, Hooper, Jonathan Edwards, even Herman Melville. Unlike biblical Judaism, rooted in the earth, protestantism has cultivated detachment from the earth and the hope of heaven as a reason not to get too settled here. I’m familiar with the contemptus mundi as a branch of the protestant psyche; like Wood, I grew up in a low church that aimed high. And I am sympathetic to the aim. I want to go to heaven too.

But I think Wood via Santorum exposes a gap in protestant thinking about how to be in and of the earth. To many, creation has to do only with a fight about when and how the universe began, not with what the earth is and how to live in it. Language about the sacredness of the earth seems to border paganism in a confusing way, and to present just that temptation that world-renouncers are trying to avoid. A view of the earth as foredoomed has led to a lot of apathy about injustice and destruction, and a failure to reckon with how embodied our religion is, how much of the creator is more than metaphorically in the creation. Elisions of creation like Santorum's don't reflect the reality of who, what and where we are, nor how long we are here. And I think we protestants do share this particular border with the pagans. If their grass is greener, it’s only because we haven’t watered ours.