I’m carrying on commenting on some poems I’ve already posted. They aren’t necessarily the best in my opinion, as some poems seem to me to be fairly obvious in their meaning and technique, and they could just possibly be good. The first one here, though, seems to me to be one of my best.
UNDERWATER
When you slip under
The long lying line of waves
Strange shapes will come
Silently propelled by waft of flipper
Or sinuous pulsing of a streamlined torso
And some maybe you knew and had forgotten
Dirt shovelled over the well has been removed
Remember the time before you broke the surface
Gasped, fumbled, burrowed
And survived by stratagem?
Now you return to them
Learning to be like a fish
Wander and linger
Here where the pearly nautilus waves unchanging
Here with the ammonite and plesiosaur
And where squat fish that never see the sunlight
Thread through great feathery banks of frond
Of hidden sting and jaw
Do you rise up towards the scattered sunlight
The crushing waves, the inconsistent wind,
The seabird that will fly to a rocky island
Drawing life from the depths, their crowded night?
When you are playing with the waves
Will you remember
Here on the fine-grained shore (maybe imagine)
Beneath the corals and the painted fish
Down with the vents, the eyeless creatures
Some heavy hidden box
That had an answer,
Where you will return?
Will you return?
The obvious meaning of the poem is a description of diving deep in a sea full of life. Some things here fit in with a literal interpretation – for example, at the deep sea bed they may indeed be vents and eyeless creatures, and seabirds do indeed draw sustenance from the teeming life in the sea. But the tone is dreamlike and it may not be a big surprise to encounter long-extinct ammonites and plesiosaurs, creatures a human would have to time travel to meet. This sea is not only full of life and variety – it’s timeless.
The sea can be a metaphor and activating image for death, eternity and the unconscious. This sea has something of all these.
What about lines 6-10? We seem to have come out of the sea. But the image of dirt shovelled over a well being removed is one of rediscovering something deliberately hidden – and the well can convey the past, the unconscious or a dissolution of familiar identity. Lines 8-10 refer to sea-life first adapting to survive on land – something in our deep past. So here as elsewhere in the poem we’re travelling back in time, as if before the eyes of a dying person flashed not only their life, but their line’s life.
In the third verse we return from the Underworld, knowing that our life outside it is fed by it. We’re like the seabird that lives on cliffs or an island (a projection of land) but could not live without the depths.
In the last verse we’re on the shore. We may return to the depths for something valuable.
This is a poem where the sound of the words matters a lot and where I use alliteration frequently.
THREE
Three sisters dancing hand in hand
They turn and whirl each in her world
At different speeds disturb the leaves
Which dancing from the forest floor
Reject the empire of the wind
Three sisters dancing hands apart
They look at nothing but the leaves
If one begins to glow with fire
If one begins to freeze with ice
They will not know, they will not meet
Three sisters dancing on the heath
Long after forest decayed and died
The one is like a flaming torch
The other cold and deadly dry
The third alive and stepping high.
The number three seems to touch something deep in us. It appears over and over again in myth, in ballad and in religion (the Trinity). Three sisters could be Shakespeare’s “three weird sisters” (“weird” meaning of pre-Christian religion), in other words, witches. My inspiration for this, though, was reading about the early history, as we now understand it, of Earth, Mars and Venus, which may once have been quite similar, but Mars went one way (lost its atmosphere and froze) and Venus the other (was smothered by its atmosphere and became far too hot for life) while Earth became suitable for life.
FOUNDER
I have set my foot in the wet sand
And seen the alien trees, the dangerous berries
Of a new land
It cannot speak before I name it
It is asleep before I claim it
I give a name to this unwary bird
Before I kill it and I tread a track
So as to become a road that traders travel;
Where I have hacked a space inside the thicket
Will be a city, I can hear the talk
Like pebbles clashing in the shifting stream
Not song nor scream
What I have not named, in the lurking forests
Will die until its bones are resurrected
Leaving its shadow over fruitful fields
Rotting the yields.
This is a rather dark adaptation of the Australian Aborigine naming myth. The first humans come to virgin land. They exploit it for their survival and begin a process which will leave to profound changes. They believe by finding and naming things they’re bringing them to life – but some things are not discovered and named, but die as a result of the human arrival. Later people will discover their remains and reconstruct their lives, but the destruction hangs over us.
Enough for now…
copyright Simon Banks 2012