For this week’s Substack, all I have to give is this poem about mangroves I wrote at 3am on Saturday night. Maybe it’s good or maybe it’s terrible, but it is predicated upon the fact that you have to understand I’m referencing “mangroves” to get it. If you don’t get that, you definitely won’t get this poem, and even if you do get that, you still might not like the poem.
How good is a piece of work if you have to explain it beforehand? How much burden can you put on your reader? Does anyone ever get poems, really?
Anyway, you’ve been warned.
Swamp Song
Man gropes
Man groans
Man grins
Man goes
Man is now a crawdad, a crab, a bat,
the salty rise, the brackish air
a piece of trash
(Wo)man grovels
(Wo)man grieves
Man becomes
Every single
knobby-weak-kneed tree
She thought she had a lover,
but
was it just
the breeze?
While I’m here I might as well share another weird witchy swampy poem I once posted to Instagram, trying to connect themes of the divine feminine to the winter moon and the coast. Also yes, I tried to incorporate Spanish, naturally.
Last but not least, since I’ve made it this far, here’s one more mangrove haiku, to keep things weird and spontaneous.
Tell the mud secrets.
Seagulls and storm clouds wonder
what we keep at bay.
Here’s what I’ve been learning about this week.
Wednesday night I saw Agatha Christie’s The Moustrap. It was great; I even reviewed it in the Newcastle Herald.
This NYT guest article from January, Train Yourself To Always Show Up really moved me. I particularly loved these sentences:
”One of the great casualties of tribalism is curiosity. And when we are no longer curious, when we don’t try to imagine or understand what another person is thinking or feeling or where her pain comes from, our hearts begin to narrow.”
This Bukowski poem is just freaking perfect. “now, if you were teaching creative writing, he asked, what would you tell them?”
Lovely stuff. Thanks for sharing.