'By day, I sit at the computer and compose words into sentences to express some corporate idea and then send it along to the proofreading department who beat the life out any kind of interesting syntax or fragmented thought. By night, I pore over my notepad trying to arrange the words of some private idea or fragmented thought so it comes alive via images, sound combinations or interesting syntax. I can write 1500 words in half a day for my day-job. It can take me days and pages and pages of my notebook to come up with a few good lines of poetry. The point is, writing poetry is hard. It's frustrating. Mind boggling. Daunting. But somewhere along the way-maybe in high school when I discovered Emily Dickinson or in college when I came across the line "as delicate as the skin of a girl's wrist," in a James Wright poem or when, after the birth of my first child, I read "Ariel... love set you going like a fat gold watch," the fire got lit in my belly. So I find myself living and breathing the words, sweating it out in workshops, reading, writing and revising to get the words right. I wonder if the poems will ever be exactly perfect but, like my children, there comes the point when I have to let them go and live on their own.'
- Elizabeth Huakaas |
a hard-boiled egg in full view
of his camp-mates, writes
twenty years later of the line between humanity
and survival
that allows a man to remain a man.
Twenty years old, she curls on her bed
moist and embryonic, egg-bald now,
a half-faced girl. Heart beating like a hummingbird's,
she never heard of Bell's Palsy. Heard
of leukemia. Never knew indignities,
knows this indignity.
The watertight egg is what prolongs us-
our humanity sealed moist inside the amnion
with our hair and brains and thumbs and let's not forget
our diseases-
and the same sac saving us
saves the wren, the crow, the hummingbird.
Picture this:
a picture inside a picture:
a girl-baby curled inside her amnion,
her girl-baby eggs safe inside
their own tiny jewel cases
like a set of Russian stacking dolls.
The Russian of Auschwitz, friendly
with the guards, guzzles his hard-boiled egg
yellowing his beard as if with pollen,
lives another fifty years
to write of the larger guilt
of surviving.
A friend, whose daughter's skin
is thin as albumen, whose child
vomits yellow even food bland as a hard-boiled egg,
whose survival is all that matters to him at fifty,
who understands Primo Levi at the stairwell now,
understands that the line between what happens to one man and another
is fragile, eggshell.
Note: Primo Levi, the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, died after throwing himself down a stairwell in 1987.