By 94stranger
Garden
It is not I the first to say
each soul is like a garden;
each death a garden
where we may no longer walk.
My garden has its walls; a hidden door
beneath the ivy, where the passer-by
would hardly look.
Inside is grass and sweetly- flowering shrubs,
a fountain and a small pavilion too.
You will not find the master
of the garden there,
on silk embroidered cushions sipping tea;
no-one in residence you’ll find
except an old man in a battered hat
composting autumn leaves.
About writing, 94stranger says: I’ve been writing poetry since I was a teenager. My career as a poet got knocked on the head at a very tender age, when I came into contact with the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Pieces such as Fern Hill were the kind of thing I would have desired to write, yet I felt that they could not possibly be bettered. At that point, I ceased to have any ambition to be a Poet.
I guess it’s taken me most of the rest of my adult life to reach the point where I feel that perhaps I have my own voice, and that in any case what others feel about what I write is not a life and death issue! I care about what I feel about it, but that’s not quite the same.
Writing poetry has been a very occasional and episodic thing with me over the years – I have more than once gone several years without writing a line. Actually, I’ve written more poetry in my three months blogging than I probably had in the previous three decades.
Essentially, I write when I am moved –- I don’t feel any obligation to try to write, because my self-image does not include that of being a professional writer in any sense.
I have my obsession with Rainring (for which I am serialising the story I wrote for the illustrators of the cards on the 20th of every month under the rubric “Tales from Rainring”) and one obsession is enough for anybody! I blog under the pseudonym of 94stranger because The Stranger is the Rainring card that represents my personal type.
This poem is a reflection of how I feel about myself. I was, incidentally, a professional gardener for many years. I think of my work these days as gardening in the psyche. The only other thing to say about this specific poem is that it hasn’t yet been matured, so I don’t know if it’s in the final form. The only way to find that out is to leave it for a year or two and then go back and take a long cold look at it. “Write in heat, revise cold” would be my motto for poetry writing, I reckon.
Lovely, moving poetry. It’s wonderful 94.
LikeLike
Hi Heather,
thank you, you are very kind.
After that, a little self-deprecation might serve me well – could I by any chance ask if you are, like me, an earth sign? I wonder if all my stuff is just Taurean ramblings!
P.S. Only yesterday I was thinking it’s long overdue that I visit you. Did you know that you were my VERY FIRST contactee on the Planet Blog? And it was you who told me about Red Ravine. It’s beginning to sound more and more as if you are the co-author of this particular featured writer’s spot!
LikeLike
I had that very same set of connections go off in my mind (anuvuestudio connection to rainring connection to red Ravine) when I saw Heather was the first to comment on your poem.
stranger, I’m an air sign, yet I also love this poem. Although I can certainly see its earthly qualities.
And I loved learning more about you via your bio. I’m glad you’ve rediscovered poetry — writing it, that is. Will you really put this one away for a year?
LikeLike
yb and 94…I’m a happy-go-lucky Sagitarian. Absolutely the truest you will ever know… born on Friday the 13th.
I was an avid gardener for many years before the “sun wars” with my face. I might be the whitest person on the planet now…next to maybe a vampire…although I haven’t seen any for a few days to compare.
I am so very glad that you all met each other. Great minds and visionary thinkers…the lot of you (and I think QM is the smartest, most logical person I’ve ever known, even though she has pink hair) … brought together by a resident soup sandwich type person…well it brings me great happiness…and makes me laugh too!
Everything happens for some strange purpose 😉
LikeLike
My favorite verses:
each death a garden
where we may no longer walk.
Your story sounds similar to mine. Many writers need to recover their voices after having their creative impulses trampled in one way or another. Blogging is a liberating process, and it’s great you’re using it as a vehicle to sounding out your poetry. It’s been that way for me too.
LikeLike
You are making me feel all warm inside. Mariachristina, I will check out your poetry pronto – I noticed your name a day or two ago and thought: I like the sound of that name.
Anyone for a literature challenge? Who WAS the first person to say – ‘each soul is like a garden’ etc?
Clues: Published first novel 1931 (not in English) Died 1944. Very famous for something else besides writing. Any ideas??
LikeLike
Yb,
I notice I didn’t respond to your question: will I really put it away for a year? I guess that rather begs the question – what is this poetry for anyway? At the moment, it’s part of an exchange between bloggers; I guess if I was ever in a siuation where it was to go into a finalised form with my none-blogging moniker attached, I would sit down and have a long, hard look at it, word by word. And I would certainly not want to have to do that with a poem with which I was still closely entwined emotionally, which is the case with anything recent.
LikeLike
That makes sense. It makes me wonder whether your “goals” around poetry (that word isn’t quite right, but I’m trying to get to what it means for you) will change over time. I wonder if you’ll ever want to submit or publish in a literary journal, for example. What do you think? Do you feel any inklings of that?
I’ve been noodling on your literature challenge. I am trying to think of a writer, perhaps Spanish-language, who would have been alive then. Everyone I think of who died later. I’ve refrained so far from googling the answer ; – ). I’m still working on it.
LikeLike
Yb,
Spanish is warm, but not hot! I think from what you know about me, you can guess what language I speak, apart from English!
LikeLike
Gaelic?
LikeLike
Thank you for the poem, Stranger. It moved me.
LikeLike
Thank you, Paul. I appreciate the simplicity.
French, Yb (remember the baking halfway up a mountainside in Southern France?)
BTW: I only just noticed: the titleof the poem is actually Garden –
as in Poetry: ‘Garden’
LikeLike
I fixed that. Yes, that makes sense.
I went to bed last night thinking, “French…”
It was too late to get up and comment on it. BUT, I’m no where closer to knowing what writer/poet. Let me noodle on this today.
LikeLike
I like the last few lines. They kind of bring you down to earth…the grounding wire at the end of a soulful dream. The French seems obvious. But I’m stumped on the writer (without researching it, which I’m not going to do. That would spoil the fun!). It sounds to me something like May Sarton would say. And I bet she did. But another time, another country, another era.
Heather, the most logical person you’ve ever known and with pink hair? Now that IS a stumper. 8)
LikeLike
I think now that Heather has been identified for the whole world to see as “The Queen of Halloween (in a holey t-shirt)” she is fishing for clues to give away our appearances.
Heather, QM actually has hair the color of lilacs, and mine is black as coal. (Maybe, maybe not ; – ).)
And to bring this conversation back to the Garden, someone once told me that dying your hair Green draws hostile attention. In other words, pink or blue or jet black hair all are accepted by greater society, but not so with Green hair. I don’t know that this is true; it’s just what I was told by someone who lived to tell about it.
LikeLike
I just tagged both of you for an instructional poetry meme.
LikeLike
Thanks, tiv. I’m an insecure poet, just so you know.
Let’s see if stranger might want to do it. He’s got talent. Check it out, stranger, on the individual voice blog. (Just click on the name of the comment above.)
LikeLike
OK, stranger, I did Google French poets because I needed more of a hint. I didn’t, however, google the phrase, nor the time s/he would have lived. So, blundering through this and showing my ignorance as to how old these poets are, here is a list of ones I wanted to test with you:
Jean Cocteau
Victor Hugo
Gustave Kahn
But was it a novelist? You said first novel written in 1933. Jean-Paul Sartre, but he lived longer and would he have written such uplifting words about one’s soul?
OK, give me more hints based on all this.
LikeLike
I just want to say: kudos to 94. Loved the majestic metaphor, the fresh imagery, and an even refreshing anticlimax!!! And I don’t think that art is merely a request for betterment. One needs to get out of other’s shadows (stalwarts as they might be!) and find one’s own voice. Art exists for gladdening our hearts. If Dostoyevsky had said the same thing about Gogol and stopped writing, we would not have known Dostoyevsky. So keep writing…
LikeLike
O.K. Yb, Cocteau would be about the right period; Hugo too early, Kahn I’ve never heard of! This guy wrote a very famous children’s book – certainly translated into English!
I’m not aware that he was ever known for writing poetry – he wrote a few novels but his most famous work was non – fiction – drawn from his experiences and those of his fellow -professionals (and I don’t mean fellow-writers)!
Notice the year of his death: 1944 – highly significant and connected to what he was so famous for. He was in his forties when he died.
You ARE working hard!
I can only imagine that Sartre would have hated this guy!
LikeLike
stranger, I had to cheat. I googled “died in 1944” and found this great website with links to famous people around the world who died in 1944. I think your guy was a pilot (aviator) who wrote The Little Prince.
Here is the link to the Who Died In 1944 website:
http://www.nndb.com/lists/454/000106136/
LikeLike
[…] the full story here Filed under: […]
LikeLike
Abhinav, you are right, and thank you for the encouragement.
The company of the great, at least for me, has been a hard thing. I guess the only appropriate sentiment is: if you can’t beat them, join them.
But I was brought up – without a word said – to know that the world was divided into the great and the rest, and I was for ever among the latter.
To which the response, I suppose, might quite reasonably be: well, why not try just to be good, at least for starters?
I might have to think aboot all this a bit!
Yb, I think you were well entitled to ‘cheat’. St Ex’s really wonderful book (I haven’t read everything of his) is Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des Hommes in the original). The thing which is very special about St Ex is that he had access to some very extraordinary experiences, whilst at the same time having an exceptional sensibility.
The bad news is that I can’t remember where he wrote that each soul is a garden – I have this feeling (since to the best of my knowledge he didn’t ever write an autobiography) that it may have been quoted in a biography of him – in which case, it’s one in English – I don’t read French any more these days.
LikeLike
BTW, on the subject of enjoyment, I did the poetry meme for the individual voice, (in verse) but it contains a rude word, so she may not have allowed it, and it may only be suitable for kids.
TIV – do i deserve any feedback?
LikeLike
I guess this has more or less run its course for the moment, so I’d like to wrap it up by doing two things.
The first is to thank QuoinMonkey and ybonesy sincerely for giving me the opportunity to give my writing an airing. It’s been enjoyable and instructive. And to thank all who’ve contributed comments and thoughts.
The second is that I’d like to paste here something I wrote on the individual voice’s blog, to explain why I sometimes indulge in silliness – not to justify it, but to explain it:
OK, I’ll spell out what I was trying to express by fooling around: to write – and no doubt this applies to any kind of writing – I think you have to be able to play.
There are people who would like to remove play from our world. In our town centre is what I would always have thought of as a toy shop. They call it the Early Learning Centre.
Parents should, if possible (and it increasingly is) be made to feel guilty if little Janet and John are playing, rather than working at learning.
None of us knows how to play any more – how could we?: it’s been educated out of us.
I think that to be truly creative and original, it is necessary to rediscover one’s inner child. When I was (say) eighteen, I desperately wanted to be grown up, to be a real adult. The longer I go on living as an adult, the sadder I become that I have been exiled from childhood, and will never find my way back.
It is the theme of Dylan Thomas’ poem, Fern Hill, about which I spoke in my bio. The last lines, for me, represent the culmination of an extraordinary cry of anguish from a hyper-sensitive man who I suppose never was able to reconcile himself to that exile:
‘Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.’
When I fool around, it’s to try and distract myself from the weight of the chains.
LikeLike
Thank YOU, stranger. I sent a note to QM over the weekend commenting that you’d been a delightful guest. (QM is out of town for a wonderful family gathering and, hence, kind of quiet these days on the blog.)
Your note about the importance of play reminded me of a parent-teacher conference my husband and I went to when our oldest was in 3rd grade. The teacher seemed downtrodden; we were one of the last parents of her 20+ charges to come to conference. When she finished talking about Dee’s progress, Jim said something like, “Sounds great. Mostly I’m just concerned that Dee is having fun and playing a bunch.” The teacher’s eyes lit up, and she said, “You’re the first parent who hasn’t obsessed about homework and grades.” She went on to say that from her perspective, we just don’t let kids be kids any more. We’re so concerned with getting into the right schools, achieving all we can achieve, etc.
I felt a little guilty because up to then I had drilled her a bit about Dee’s math. I guess I see and live in so much of the competitive world that I tend to get pulled into it more than Jim does.
But your melancholoy take on being exiled from childhood (and what a moving way to express it) and not finding your way back — that resonates deeply. I know I’ve given you some grief for fooling around, but I do hope you know that I dearly appreciate you.
LikeLike
Yb,
thank you.
You know, I am always scared. I guess inside me there’s a little kid who was brought up that way. I appreciate you and the red ravine people greatly also.
pax
LikeLike
Post: ‘Artistic inspiration and the universal Unconscious: early thoughts’. I know it involves YOU! Please, if you have a moment, drop in at http://94stranger.wordpress.com/ and add your wisdom to our store!
Hi yb and QM – I finally got bounced into writing about artistic inspiration. PLEASE, when you have a moment, come over, check this out and add your thoughts – I’m very interested to know what you both have to say – though you could run the risk of having to write a book about it I suppose!
take care
94S
LikeLike
[…] Poetry: Garden by 94stranger […]
LikeLike