Poetry notes

Heaney (1939–2013), Irish Nobel poet, places this lyric in Death of a Naturalist (1966), a farm childhood in County Derry after the War. It is not a political poem on the page. It is a memory of late August: a week of rain and sun, berries ripening from green to red to black-purple. Hunger sends the children out with milk-cans, pea-tins and jam-pots. They pick until the tins are full, palms sticky, thorns in the skin. They hoard the fresh berries in the byre (a cow-shed, not a threshing barn). A rat-grey fungus blooms; the juice turns to vinegar; a stink fills the store. The child hoped they would keep. They never did. Every year the hope comes back. That is the whole plot.

The first movement is lust of the eye and the mouth: juice like thickened wine, “lust” for picking that does not stop at enough, neighbour children, hayfields, caches in wet grass. The second movement is the byre and the rot. Innocence is not a moral lecture. It is a palate that has not yet learned that hunger and decay share the same fruit. (The PDF prints “Blackberry Picking”; the book title hyphenates it.)

Unit 1’s word here is a quiet alienation: the child is estranged from his own hope. Do not drag ecofeminism into the berries unless a question asks nature and power; Heaney’s nature is farm work and disappointment, not Chipko. For RTC: name the season, the picking, the stored fruit that will not keep, the yearly return of hope.

Naheed (b. 1940, Bulandshahr; family moved to Lahore in 1949) is an Urdu feminist poet. The set English is Rukhsana Ahmad’s version in We Sinful Women (1991). The lyric is an interior address that keeps one command: “Punish me.” The speaker has written a dream in her own blood, taught the mind the power of the pen, challenged a “crucifix of hatred,” and freed womanhood from a deluded night. She asks to be punished because if she lives, the addressee may lose honour (izzat / face); if her sons raise their hands, that power ends. The last turn: punish me, for then the sentence of your punishment will itself end.

The title is not chat. Talking to herself is what a woman does when the public room has no ear (Unit 1, alienation and identity). The refrain “Punish me” is irony: the crime is literacy, future-dream, the torch that burns against the wind. Patriarchy is the unspoken “you” who sentences; the poem outlives the sentence. Do not confuse this lyric with her more famous “We Sinful Women”; the set title is “Talking to Myself.”

Cofer (1952–2016), Puerto Rican–American, prints this short lyric in The Latin Deli. Latin women pray in incense-sweet churches, in Spanish, to an Anglo God with a Jewish heritage. The “great white father” on his marble pedestal looks down on brown daughters; votive candles shine; he is unmoved. Year after year Margarita, Josefina, Maria and Isabel kneel, hoping that if he is not omnipotent he may at least be bilingual.

This is Unit 1 multiculturalism without a happy ending: two languages share a pew; the face of God has not learned Spanish. Hybridity is the women’s lives; the statue stays one colour. The last joke is theological and political at once — bilingual God as the smallest recognition. For RTC: name the church, the colour-line of the father, the four names, the hope that he hear Spanish.

Subramaniam (b. 1967, Mumbai) prints “Home” in Where I Live. The speaker asks for a home that is not hers: rooms she can slip in and out of without a trace, no worry over plumbing or curtains or the heap of books, a house worn lightly, not clogged with yesterday’s talk, where the self does not bloat to fill every crack. Then the turn: a home like this body — alien when she tries to belong, hospitable when she decides she is only visiting.

Identity here is not a flag. Belonging inflates the self; visiting lets the rooms breathe. Diaspora poems on this paper (Ali, Lim) miss a place on a map. Subramaniam’s homelessness is inward: even the body is a guest-house. Do not write “she has no house in Mumbai.” Write: she refuses ownership as a way of staying alive in a room. RTC: the request for an un-owned home; the body as alien/host.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim (b. 1944, Malacca), Chinese-Malaysian American poet, prints this lyric in Crossing the Peninsula (1980). The father’s sadness appears in the daughter’s dreams. His young body is dying of responsibility: so many men and women march out of his mouth; when he opens his heart he is shot down. He is “an oriental” who claims paternity, yet in dreams he is only a young body with his own life still before him.

The second movement puts his sadness on her face: his tears, his desires drumming in her chest, a young man’s restlessness with no woman in sight. Each child broke him finer, clay crumbling in an hour-glass. To be a father is to be a bull under the axle, a mangrove netted by lianas, a host perishing of its own lavishness. Diaspora and acculturation sit inside the family, not at passport control. The daughter inherits the weight. RTC: dream of the dying young body; the mask on her face; the mangrove/host image of fatherhood.

Neruda (1904–1973), Chilean Nobel poet. The set English is Alfred Yankauer’s version in The Essential Neruda. A dog has died; the speaker buried him in the garden beside a rusted machine. There will be no heaven for the dog, perhaps, and no lies: this was not a circus dog or a wet-nosed beggar of affection. He looked at the man with the independence of his own being. Now the speaker is also a little dead.

Walk the middle before the last line. Yankauer’s dog is not a circus pet and not a wet-nosed beggar of love. He did not fawn. He looked at the man as another creature with his own life — “the independence of his own being.” There is no padded heaven promised; the speaker will not dress the death in church language. After the burial he feels himself a little dead: the companion who made a “we” is soil beside a rusted machine. Grief here is anti-rhetoric. Companionship was eye-to-eye, not ownership. Unit 1 alienation is that leftover human world. Do not open with ecofeminism; Heaney’s berries and this dog are nature lyrics, not Shiva. RTC: garden burial; the independent look; no false heaven; the speaker’s smaller life.

Szymborska (1923–2012), Polish Nobel poet. The syllabus title is “A Great Number”; Barańczak and Cavanagh print it in View with a Grain of Sand (1995). Other books call the same lyric “A Large Number” (Wielka liczba, 1976). Do not treat them as two poems. Four billion people on the earth; her imagination still cannot hold a crowd that size and is still moved by one particular face. A flashlight picks random faces on a dark road; the rest stay unheeded. Even Dante could not keep them all in memory. She chooses by discarding; what she throws away is denser than what she keeps. A little poem, she says, costs indescribable losses. Dreams are lonely, not packed with the billions. An empty house grows annexes — extra rooms — of echo, not legal “contracts.”

Walk it as ethics, not as a census. Globalization on this paper is the four billion; alienation is the one life that cannot hold them. Art can love particulars and must confess the many it leaves silent. RTC: the number the mind cannot hold; the flashlight; choosing by discarding; the small poem’s cost; annexes of echo.

Angelou (1928–2014), African American poet and memoirist. The set lyric is from And Still I Rise (1978). A “you” has written her down in history with twisted lies and trod her in the dirt. She rises like dust, like moons and suns, like tides. The poem answers with body, laugh, diamonds at the meeting of her thighs, a black ocean leaping. The last claim: she is the dream and the hope of the slave; she rises.

Identity here is spoken against a history that named Black women as less (Unit 1). The refrain is not a whisper; it is a public beat. Multiculturalism on this paper includes this insistence that the same nation hold her rising. Do not reduce the lyric to “positive thinking.” The “you” is historical violence; the rise is political and bodily. RTC: the history-writing “you”; dust/moon/tide similes; the slave’s dream in the last stanza.

Ali (1949–2001), Kashmiri American poet. The set lyric is in The Beloved Witness (1992). Kashmir shrinks into a mailbox: home is a neat four-by-six-inch card. He always loved neatness; now he holds the half-inch Himalayas in his hand. “This is home. And this the closest / I’ll ever be to home.” When he returns, the colours will not be so brilliant, the Jhelum not so ultramarine; love will be overexposed. Memory will be a little out of focus — a giant negative, still undeveloped.

This is the paper’s clearest diaspora lyric: scatter, homeland as image, incomplete presence. The postcard is not a souvenir. It is the only scale at which home will stay still. Return will not restore the picture; the negative stays undeveloped. Displacement (learning outcome) is the hand holding Himalayas that will not be walked. RTC: the mailbox size; “closest I’ll ever be”; the undeveloped negative.