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Carolyn Marie Souaid: Poems
By
Aug 26, 2005, 20:03
From Snow Formations
Threads
The danger is not what you know
but what you think you know.
Someone famous said that or a fairy
fed it to me in a dream. Either way
the grenade I saw yesterday
on television might have been an artichoke.
And soft green words
might be a figment of your imagination.
Take that couple over there, in the half-light
of an evening tree.
Couldn't the man be mistaken? Couldn't her whispers
in his ear be the trickery of breezes and summer cottons?
Isn't it possible that the elm is really a flimsy
umbrella--
worse, the rainsoaked photo of a flimsy umbrella
coming apart in threads?
Chaos enters the brain swimmingly. Mere humans,
we realign ourselves, posturing.
Artifacts
Assorted broken dolls
by a grave site,
armless, nude,
eyes obliterated
by centuries of ice.
One might confound them
with those running
wounded
from their men:
Eskimo wives
in southern dress,
bandaged
in the stubborn moss
of June.
Don't.
Inukshuk
That brown speck on the tundra
that thing like lint
on a white dress,
that's me.
Move a little closer.
Seems I've been here since the Vikings,
since way before you.
For years, I've watched the herds
come and go. The river.
I can certainly tell you a little something
about bearing up, stalwart. Resilient.
Unaffected by the rose moss
springing in a breeze,
the teardrop
clouds.
Let me tell you about the stone
will. How, even through the
poignant light of softer days
I go on, standing.
Visibly intact. Touch me,
and I fall apart.
Still, Life
From the graveyard everything looks good.
Shrouded, now, in white,
crystallized, I see that.
I also see carbonized snow
as a good thing.
Pardon my cynicism, my failure to acknowledge this
sooner. I'll get to the point.
How many of us ever take time to enjoy
the Earth's exquisite intricacies? Victorian lace.
Spider-webs. The organza wing
of a common fly.
Who, among us, actually hears
bracelets in the chilly wind? A rattlesnake
coiling through light?
Put it this way.
Next time you claim to be bored,
visualize brownish-blackish grim nothingness
and then feed on the world,
one breath at a time. Imagine the tang
of unusual spices on your tongue;
red dust falling
lightly
from a powdered stamen.
Loosen the flower, drink some wine,
make your solemn declaration
singingly--
I can't even imagine not being here.
From Satie's Sad Piano
Prologue
The New Millennium
The bishops feared a dip on Wall Street,
flashfloods, tornadoes, snow squalling
in tongues, the chickens awry,
–-a white, interstellar madness.
They predicted the harvest in tatters,
provisions under the staircase
stupefied into dust.
The prescient would hear it coming:
a week early, demons in the glassware,
heirloom dinner plates shifting
imperceptibly,
a chink in the rattling air.
They feared 40 days & 40 nights
of blighted, non-believers
spitting up blood, bile, the Seven Deadly Sins
of the rainbow
bruised & shaken, the last conscious radio
issuing prayers for the End.
But midnight came & went, dragging its long face,
& spring arrived, as always: seeded
with light.
By whose leaden will did I fall
into fall’s most alluring musk?
Who deranged the senses
such that I nosed beyond the knowable
road, the tactile
alligator bark of trees?
Who sent me gibbering into my
simple, primitive brain?
Father, I know not that I have sinned,
merely this:
I would as soon travel blind
as inhabit earth’s pedestrian corridors.
Lured by the cinnabar waltz
of leaf on leaf,
gold sniffing out rust.
Delusional.
Love thrown, whimsically,
my way.
Summer hums with improvised gaiety.
In a parallel hemisphere.
Birdsong in ascending scale. Dawn gladdened
with mangrove, eucalyptus. Jubilant
over-the-moon kids promising
all the wrong things to each other.
So rapt, so absorbed in their own rhythm,
they’re unaware of the storm
making overtures on the horizon.
Because living hasn’t yet tapered off into
Satie’s sad piano.
Yes, the rest of the world seems to know
a thing or two about love’s bitter edge,
the dirge that wells up, unannounced,
to drown the Orphean blue. But who will say?
Having been there themselves. Having known
what it means to drag among the baritones,
but before that, what it really is to fly.
The city awoke, refurbished. Yesterday’s euphony
of rain easing into birdsong.
After the long night, quiet restoration.
But whatever happened to those lovers
singing the raspberry blush of dawn?
I ask not out of anger or spite,
but out of genuine sorrow.
Sometimes, second thoughts
bear no resemblance
to second thoughts:
their failure to accommodate
the fluctuating light.
A rosebush beneath the window.
The last warbling stars,
bending away.
The Gazette, Montreal, Friday, December 23, 2005
Writers Fined for ‘Insulting’ Turkey
Suzan Fraser
Associated Press
Ankara, Turkey –
An Istanbul court separately fined an author and a journalist yesterday for insulting the state, the latest convictions under a law that EU officials say must be changed.
But the government indicated it has no plans to make changes. “Freedoms are not limitless, in freedom there’s a definite limit,” said Prime Minister Recap Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday.
Zulkuf Kisanak, the author of Lost Villages, was sentenced to five months in prison, which was immediately converted to a $2,200 U.S. fine. Aziz Ozer, editor of the far-left magazine Yeni Dunya Icin Cagri, was sentenced to a 10-month prison term, which the judge later switched to a $4,400 U.S. fine.
Both men were fined under a law that makes it a crime to insult the Turkish republic, “Turkishness” or state institutions. The law has soured relations with the European Union, which insists that the country-which began EU membership negotiations in October-do more to protect freedom of expression.
The law is also being used against Orhan Pamuk, a prominent writer charged with insulting Turkey after telling a newspaper “30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it.”
Kisanak’s book tells the story of 14 villages that were forcibly evacuated by the Turkish military in the early 1990s, during the height of clashes between Turkish troops and autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels.
Ozer was sentenced for two articles - 80 Years of the Turkish Republic, 80 Years of Fascism and No to a Partnership of Invasion in Iraq - published in the magazine.
UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO THE EDITOR / MY RESPONSE
December 26, 2005
To the Editors of The (Montreal) Gazette,
Having just returned from the 4th International Symposium Against Isolation held in Paris, France, I feel compelled to add my personal footnote to a story you ran last week about an author and journalist who were sentenced to prison and later fined by an Istanbul court for dissing the state (Writers fined for “insulting” Turkey, December 23, 2005). The four-day conference dealt with the imprisonment of political and cultural activists and the increased application of isolation and torture as a means of suppressing legal and democratic rights opposition, particularly in Turkey. I was part of a Canadian delegation of poets (including Elias Letelier, Jorge Etcheverry and Endre Farkas) invited to participate in the struggle of a dedicated group of Turkish people committed to speaking out against such injustices.
Your story mentioned that the writers in question were fined under a law that makes it a crime to “insult the Turkish republic, ‘Turkishness’ or state institutions.” But if these authors are anything like the stout-hearted people I met in Paris, fighting to overturn a barbaric, Draconian prison system, then what is their crime? Trying to improve the human condition?
There is a world of difference between criticizing state institutions and criticizing the culture of a people. The closing night of the symposium, we- the four Canadians- recited our poems about resistance and about the power of the human spirit to an audience of roughly 400 people. We received a standing ovation.
And in the heat of that moment up on stage, I thought about how we, in this country, take for granted the rights and freedoms we have guaranteed to us by our own Canadian Charter. I thought about how complicit we are-particularly those of us living in the so-called “free” world- if we don’t find hands-on ways of expressing our solidarity with the people in this world who most need our help. I thought about American author Herman Melville who once said: “We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibres, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”
Carolyn Marie Souaid
Montreal, Canada
Biography
Carolyn Marie Souaid is a teacher, poetry reviewer (The Gazette), and the author of five collections of poetry, including Satie's Sad Piano, which was nominated for the 2006 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her latest work "Flight," was released as a limited edition chapbook by Rubicon Press in 2007. Her work has been produced for CBC-Radio, and has been published nationally and internationally. She has appeared at many literary festivals across Canada, and was recently sent to Paris, France as part of a Canadian delegation of four poets invited to participate in the 4th International Symposium Against Isolation (a four-day forum on the inhumane treatment of prisoners of conscience in Turkey).
Since 2004, she has become involved in projects aimed at moving poetry off the page and into public spaces. She is the co-producer (with Endre Farkas) of two major Montreal events: Poésie en mouvement / Poetry in Motion (the poetry-on-the-buses project, 2004) and Cirque des mots / Circus of Words, a multilingual cabaret of performance poetry.
October (Signature Editions, 1999) set against the backdrop of the events of the 1970 FLQ crisis in Quebec represented Montreal in a display celebrating “Montreal World Book Capital” in 2005-2006.
She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Concordia University in Montreal.
Publications / Performances
Paper Oranges Signature Editions, 2008
Flight Rubicon Press, 2007
Blood is Blood,
(a poem for two-voices, co-written with Endre Farkas, produced for CBC Radio One by Steve Wadhams, broadcast December 18, 2006)
Neiges Les Editions Triptyque, 2006
(translation of "Snow Formations" by Alain Cuerrier)
Satie's Sad Piano Signature Editions, 2005
Snow Formations Signature Editions, 2002
October Nuage Editions, 1999
Fille au bord de l'eau Ecrits des Forges, 1998 (translation of "Swimming into the Light" by Marie Evangeline Arsenault)
Swimming into the Light Nuage Editions, 1995
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