Polish poets, reprise

I've been re-reading Elegy for the Departure, a posthumous collection of forty years of poetry by Zbigniew Herbert. With a nod to Dave Bonta, who did something similar in responses to poems of Paul Zweig, maybe I'll post a few of these occasionally over the next week or two, with (in my case) a prose response. I'll be taking all the poems down in a few weeks to prevent extended copyright infringement. This one is untitled.

We fall asleep on words
we wake among words

sometimes they are gentle
simple nouns
a forest a ship

they tear themselves from us
the forest goes quickly
behind the line of the horizon

the ship sails away
without a trace or a reason

dangerous are the words

which have fallen from a whole
fragments of sentences maxims
the beginning of a refrain
of a forgotten hymn

"saved will be those who..."
"remember to..."
or "like"
a small prickly pin
that connected
the most beautiful
lost metaphor of the world

one must dream patiently
hoping the content will become complete
that the missing words
will enter their crippled sentences
and the certainty we wait for
will cast anchor

--Zbigniew Herbert

Last night I dreamt of my mother. It hasn't happened often, since she died. But even though I find it difficult to look at her picture, lately I've been aware of the wish, somewhere in the darker shadows of my mind or heart, that I had a video of her, or a recording of her voice.

In the dream, we were making such a video. She was seated at a table, speaking, smiling. Sometimes she wore pale blue. Sometimes yellow. Sometimes her head was wrapped in a white cloth, like the towel she twisted over her hair after washing it. I can't remember anything she said; in fact as I replay the dream in my mind it's almost as if it's silent. But I see her moving, and in one frame of the dream she smiles at me - a familiar smile.

I'm glad I can't remember the fragments; each word would feel lost now, in the morning, unable to breathe itself into the wholeness of a sentence, a thought. So the ship sails away, the forest disappears behind the horizon of the rising day in which, instead, I must speak words of my own: words I'd often happily forget but always find so easy to remember.

Comments

[marja-leena]

Amazing how your beautifully written words and the poem have a similar feeling. Did you know the poem before you had the dream and wrote this, Beth?

[beth]

Thank you, Marja-Leena. No, if I'd read it before I didn't remember it. But then we don't sometimes, if we don't make some connection...

[Martine]

Très beau billet, Beth.

Just 5 months before my mom passed away unexpectedly, I had managed to borrow a video camera and spent some time filming the members of my family. These few minutes of my mom moving and talking on video became very precious for all of us.

11 years later, I still can only watch the video in little doses. It is that powerful.

[rr]

What a beautiful conjunction. Thank you.

[Fred Garber]

Beautiful post. My mother has been dead for 21 years. I am lucky enough to have a copy of a short fil she was in when she was attending Grinnell College. It was made in 1931.

[Lucy]

My dreams of seeing my mother again are distressing; I assumed her death in error, she survived but I abandoned her in ignorance, didn't wait long enough before moving on. All fairly obvious in meaning I suppose, but I don't quite know what to do about it.
This is lovely, I love the image of her in blue and /or yellow, and the white towel, and the silence.

[mb]

I find the piece about your mother very moving. It works well with the poem.

[beth]

All these comments are appreciated a lot. Thank you...

[dave]

A promising start; I'll be very interested in seeing where you go with this.

This is also another great example of the kind of thing I'd like to see in a criticism and commentary section of qarrtsiluni.

(You can an oops in the first sentence: "poetry by Zbigniew Herbert's.")

[beth]

Thanks, Dave. I already fixed so many typos in this piece, and here's another! Sheesh.

[beth]

Fred - re-reading now - how fortunate, and how remarkable, that you have that film of your mother from so long ago! I'm going to ask my cousins and some of my mother's friends if they ever shot any home videos - one of them may have and just has no idea it would mean anything to me. J. has taken a lot of photos over the years, and in some, when you flip quickly through the shots, you can see her expression move and change in a very natural way. It's fascinating. There's also an audio recording of one Thanksgiving but not much of her; she was always kind of a strong presence but in the background.

[Dick]

Yes, a fine balance between the Zbigniew Herbert poem (a favourite of mine) & your dream account. I hope that, the dream video having been shot, you might return to it.

[dale]

(o)

[beth]

Thanks, Dick. I hope so too. And thanks for the (o), Dale.

[Theriomorph]

Beautiful, Beth. The Herbert poem and the dream prose, both. Thank you -