Poetry Dare: Dreaming with Darwish (Part 3)

“Tell me how you lived your dream in some place, and I’ll tell you who you are.” ~Mahmoud Darwish

It started as just a 30-day dream dare with Mahmoud Darwish.  It’s been 60 days, and I’m not done with him yet. This poetry dare arrived in two parts: first, read a poem a day from The Butterfly’s Burden and second, write some poems of my own, a handful spawned from my own dreams as well as four traditional “dreamlike” form poems.

Form poems. Oh my! I’ve written a couple in the past. I dreamed I could be done with them.

Raja Shehadeh asked Darwish why he had moved from writing traditional Arab form poetry. Darwish responded that nothing found in the old forms could help express the state of defeat many Palestinians found themselves in after 1948. “The need arose for a revolutionary form of expression for revolutionary poetry. This was a response to events far beyond our control. It was not a deliberate, studied response.” There was no longer comfort in the traditional.

The Poetry Archive describes form poetry like this:

“Form, in poetry, can be understood as the physical structure of the poem: the length of the lines, their rhythms, their system of rhymes and repetition. In this sense, it is normally reserved for the type of poem where these features have been shaped into a pattern, especially a familiar pattern.”

But for Darwish, the familiar patterns of life were gone, and the rhythm of his life was broken. Rather than conform, he took what he already knew poetically and began to re-form the old patterns, to express his pain, fight back with words, and still celebrate the beauty and rhythm of the natural landscape.

I bought The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland before I tried to write my own poems. I’ve not been able to get away from Darwish; I even found him in its pages.

“Poetry is shown to be, as it always has been, a process, as well as a product. A great part of that process is the poet’s interior conversation with a possessed and disposed formal past, and also with a great exterior discourse.”

I read that the “charm and power of poetic form is not imposed; it is rooted.” Darwish, though, was uprooted. His once-possessed past was disposed, gone, and so he tried to make sense of it with more radical poetry, by “negotiating the charged space between what is inherited and what is known, ” by challenging the traditional, and “pushing the music [or the dissonance] of dailyness against the customary shapes, ” by using his “voice against the line.” But he already knew and had practiced the forms.

“Forms are—as we believe—not locks, but keys, ” write Strand and Boland.

I keep this in mind as I begin my own poems, remembering that I have to know and practice the basics—like learning the notes and chords and keys and fingering patterns on my harp before I can improvise. But I’m really not sure how or where to start. So I start with Darwish who said, “no poem starts from nothing. Humanity has produced such a huge poetic output, much of it of a very high caliber. You are always building on the work of others. There is no blank page from which to start. All you can hope for is to find a small margin on which to write your signature.”

I decide to start with a pantoum. This form, I read, is unusual among the strict forms because there’s no specified length and it demands less from the poet because of the line echoes. I also decide to write it as a found poem using only some favorite lines from The Butterfly’s Burden. I’ll just write my signature in a small margin of his words instead of thinking up my own. 

Nurture Hope – A Pantoum

We nurture hope
while we are heaping fog,
waiting for the berries to ripen on the fence.
The end is beginning’s sister.

While we are heaping fog,
we have but one goal: to be.
And the end is beginning’s sister.
As for me, the road will carry me.

We have but one goal: to be.
I’ll teach you waiting.
As for me, the road will carry me
until I write the final line.

I’ll teach you waiting,
so look behind you to find the dream
until I write the final line.
And every poem is a dream.

So look behind you to find the dream,
the butterflies of my dreams.
And every poem is a dream
wet with butterflies and dew.

Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams
while waiting for the berries to ripen on the fence.
Since dreams are narrow at our doors,
we nurture hope.

A villanelle circles around, refuses to move forward, and suggests “at the deepest level, powerful recurrences of mood and emotion and memory.” It often carries the idea of loss. I decide to get a little brave with this form and use all my own words to voice some personal grieving.

 I Sense Change – A Villanelle

They’ve closed the door,
but in my heart a river flows,
and changes swirl once more.

Recall a table bowed to floor,
a sacred space where life time slows.
They’ve closed the door.

The trees are dying clothes they wore
while in the sky a lone hawk soars,
and changes swirl once more.

The fields are ripe with fruit they bore
and offer sacrifice by rows.
They’ve closed the door.

The canyon echoes in my core
while seeded possibility grows,
and changes swirl once more.

I sip a blend from grieving’s store
I hold the memories close.
But it’s okay they’ve closed the door,
and changes swirl once more.

I also wrote a long “Senseless Sestina” that was a combination of Darwish’s words and mine, about horses and flies.

. . . I dare to dare and hold a wake
for fear. I let thoughts and images seep like butter
in my brain, like honey in a hive abuzz with poems.
I’ll free some space to dare a dare and dream a dream
And let the horses and the butterflies fly.

The fires out west and some social media posts by a friend who was threatened by them inspired my rondeau:

When fires rage against the sky,
we can’t waste time to wonder why.
We stack our boxes—one, two, three
in case we get the call to flee.
We hold stuff loose—the cost’s too high.

You know what I discovered about writing in form? It’s not so bad after all. Here’s the heart of the deal. I may be done with this dare. But I doubt I’ll ever be done with dreaming, Darwish, or even with poem forms. The cost’s too high. I’m going to live my dream in this place—and one day figure out who I am and become whom I’m meant to be.

Photo by Chris Hays, Creative Commons via Flickr. Post by Sandra Heska King.

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Sandra Heska King

I’m a Michigan girl who left a 150-year-old family farmhouse on 60 acres to build a hummingbird-sized empty nest in Florida, right next to the Everglades. I thrive on a good dare and believe there’s no age-barrier to adventure—whether it’s kayaking with alligators, biking too close to a rattlesnake, riding a rollercoaster, or committing long poems near sleepy iguanas. I take lever harp lessons; buy more books than I own shelves to put them on; drink tea, tea, and more tea; and eat M&M’s the proper way (one sweet circle at a time). I’m also thinking to paint my front door chartreuse (don’t tell the HOA).

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