One of the things that really highlighted that I might be autistic is poetry.
UQ’s WRIT2100 – Creative Writing: Poetics was a joy, a place where this mature-age student felt at home, learning about different poetry forms, the villanelle, the ghazal, acrostic, alliterative, and writing. Writing, my first love.
Yet when we shared our poems in tutorials for peer review, that was when disquietitude crept in. I write for rhyme, rhythm and meter. The other students were finding meanings in my poems that I didn’t know where there.
The rhetorical analysis of poem, though, it did me in. I can tell you about telos, about logos, about ethos, about pathos. My branch of autism, though, cannot apply those concepts in the analysis of poetry.
Yet, I still write poetry, good, bad and indifferent. Here are today’s musings.
Several concepts were swirling in my head, around resilience, overload and fatigue. These three poems are almost a triptych, in my head. I can visualise them, written on sepia-toned paper, triptych framed, the left and right hinged, turned in slightly to the centre.
Left – We Are More
We are more
When heart feels heavy,
and mind feels dark.
When nights are sleepless,
then days become stark.
But every day is a day anew,
this day can bear a new mark.
Every thought, every breath, every tear,
stand up, breath deep, listen, hark.
The breeze of daybreak, the rising sun
chasing on heels of night dark.
The birds stirring, night critters fleeing,
Nature lives, yes, in city park.
Oases of green, peace and serenity,
amidst the heart of of urban mark.
Resilience stands tall, green to cars
breathe in, breathe out – your mark.
Right – We are human
We are human
From darkness into light
From rage into calm
Even though rage feels like a balm
From grief into acceptance
From tears into sleep
Even though you need, so, to keep
Yet love and grief, happy and sad,
Are twinned, flame and shadow
Even though you yearn for meadow
Meadows and hedges, trees so green
Still, though storms, they rage
Even though the world is their stage
From day into night, duality
Yet liminal sight, plurality
More than this or that, sure
This AND that AND so much more
Centre – We are whole
We are whole
A symphony of light and sound
The symphony of life, all around.
Psyche, spirit, soul, self
Whole in plurality.
Strands woven, braided
More than duality
More than black and white
FROM happiness TO sadness
FROM tears TO rage
FROM love TO sorrowed madness
Psyche, spirit, soul, self
Self’s plurality, braided, pretty
The tension of torsion, twisting
Leaning in, torsion becomes pirouette
Self’s plurality, resilient, resiling
Self’s plurality, braided, pretty
Division and friction, force shearing
Strands part, new connections
Self’s plurality, resilient, resiling
Equilibrium and stasis
Life’s basis, self-embraces
Mirrored face
I am whole
This poem was inspired by my musings on country singers and country music and how they generally treat 4am and 5am as the darkest hours, the witching hours, the hours of sleepless dread.
Literally figurative
It’s darkest before dawn, they say
Meaning that things will get worse
Before things start to get better
Figurative not literal
Demeaning predawn and sunrise
Ancient attitudes feared the night
Ancestral fear of night hunters
Literal not figurative
The darkness before dawn is grand
In night’s last breath before yielding
To the grandure of the sunrise
Figurative not literal
Twilight, the sunlight, refracted
Civil six degrees, nautical
Six to twelve, astro is eighteen
Literal not figurative
Planet Earth garbed in the raiment
The finery of a new day
New opportunities, restarts
Figurative not literal
Imagination and science
Once mystery, now understood
Poets, writers, musicians dream
Literal and figurative
The Auld Skald's Fudgel 