| Anita Barrows USA
Here is a tree abundant with lemons, in dark midwinter. Here
Pastorale Once I came to a pasture fence
Reflection & body Dusk. Midwinter.
Starting with a bone
for Anne
1
Sometimes, on winter afternoons,
somebody's mother would make a soup
starting with a bone, a shankbone
the butcher had put aside.
The whole house would fill with the smell
of onions, celery, potatoes
releasing their crispness, offering
what earth had offered them
to the broth swirling around the bone
that sat at the bottom of the pot.
All the flavors that had come into being
in different ways, mixing with what
the bone, too, gave forth, bone
of this animal who had lived its life
in a field, a pasture
somewhere we never imagined, we
who waited to be fed.
2
We watched a film about a boy
who would have done anything to survive,
& did: became a traitor, invoked murder
on the heads of his own people.
Who can judge him? He was a boy,
He wanted to live. In the end
he lived, was reunited
with his brother, fathered sons
of his own. The innocence or pragmatism
in his face gave way to sadness.
He sang a song: How good it is
to be sitting together
with friends.
Always I have thought
that, given such circumstances, I would have gone
down with my hand in some
stranger's hand, hoping only
to remember some song of grief
or praise to sing in the face
of terror. But who knows?
The film asks if there is something
to choose that is more
than survival. The film asks whether survival,
in the end, is the only way
to transform desire into wisdom,
wisdom into sorrow.
3
What is hard is transmuted
to softness & we say
it is heat that performs
this mystery, makes space
expand among molecules, invisible
widen around invisible. What is locked in
begins to emerge. What can't be eaten
turns to something
you could eat.
What is dormant
sprouts green, knows at last
what it has been
created for, gropes its way
into daylight.
4
.... and how sometimes, eating this soup,
you would find in your mouth the bone
or a piece of it, curiously
tender
How you would crush it between your teeth
& find it not even as resistant
as raw apple or a crust of bread
How it would come apart, then,
in your mouth, & how you would taste
the flavor of all it had taken in, the flavor
of everything that was
this soup:
vegetable, animal, salt
5
This soup is for the sick
This soup is for those who mourn others who have died
This soup is for those who have not yet learned how to mourn
This soup is for those who are cold
This soup is for those who stand in line for hours, waiting for
water
This soup is for those who have no water
This soup is for those who are too weak to walk, & have fallen by
the way
This soup is for those who sit, holding the heads of those who have
fallen
This soup is for the child who has just started to name what is in
it, who says
beans, peas
This soup is for the child who has forgotten the name she was given
This soup is for the child who has searched every tent, looking for
his father
This soup is for the cow whose calf was stillborn, the cow who came
to the edge
of the field so the children could put their
hands on her broad head
This soup is for those who planted these carrots, for those who
planted these
onions
This soup is for the rain, this soup is for the soil
This soup is for the animal whose bone it was made from
This soup is for the animal whose bone it was made from
6
If you have too structured an idea of your life......
If you are in anguish over what you have lost.....
The man in prisoner's clothing
hears a familiar voice, looks over
at the crowd of newly captured prisoners, finds
his brother, separated from him
years before
& Lara, long after the weeks
in the frozen rooms, where Zhivago
wrote -- daily -- poems of their love --
sees him from the window
of a bus
passing through the crowded city
moments before his death
7
Take my hand, look for me
How, across widening space,
will we know one another
Will you eat this soup?
This earth is a body of broken bones
We belong
to nothing
except as we are transformed
by it, except as it is transformed
into ourselves
Stations (1)
for Emma © All Copyright, Anita Barrows. |
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