Back to 2006 Ghazals
Issue Seven
- Inshaallah, David Lunde
- Rose Ghazal, Darren Coxon
- ikebana, Nell Grey
- humming, Nell Grey
- endings, beginnings, Nell Grey
- Editor's Comments
Inshaallah1
by David Lunde
The future is a hope, a wish, so chant inshaallah;
We plan to do, but only can or can't: inshaallah.
On their long, foggy, mapless, south and north migrations,
Surely those honking geese incant a loud inshaallah.
Willing muscles not to cramp, doesn't every racer,
Finish line in sight, breath coming short, pant, inshaallah?
In Mexico, they have their mañana, but Muslims
Of the Levant say "maybe tomorrow inshaallah."
Having plowed, harrowed, fertilized and pesticided,
The farmer, at planting time, shrugs and says inshaallah.
Whenever my plane strikes out into those 'friendly skies',
Though my faith is scant, I swallow a faint inshaallah.
One grain of sand seems much like another, doesn't it?
But implanted in an oyster? a pearl, inshaallah.
In the fable the provident ant serves as model,
but grasshopper or ant, truly it's all inshaallah.
Daoud, you would-be ghazalkar, just ape the mullah—
keep your fingers crossed and chant inshaallah.
1"if God wills"
Rose Ghazal
by Darren Coxon
The last day we were together, I gave you roses;
You put them in a crystal vase, these yellow roses.
They began from rooted soil somewhere we'd never go,
their first slow movement watched over by other roses.
The gardener's hands were hard with love and digging holes
for flower roots, to press in tulips and new roses.
Holes hold all beginnings and endings, all birth and death.
The body is folded into the earth, like your roses.
Your body, warm and silent somewhere else, folded in
new sheets, dream-showered and filled with the ache of roses.
ikebana
by Nell Grey
Her eyes and mouth full of gin and sun
she says the truth is here, in the sun.
Tourists strip naked, prostrate themselves;
the English, long dogs in the noon sun.
In Tokyo some girls grow slowly
in the shadows cast by boys called Sun.
Paper fans flutter like parasols
held by thin bamboo and rays of sun.
Carp grow old and speckled, white and gold
in cool spaces fingered by the sun.
Her name doesn't mean chrysanthemum
to young ex-pats in The Rising Sun.
The cinnabar moth comes out by day
to scorch its scarlet wings in the sun.
Kiku cries for the child she was then
now she flowers in sin in the Sun.
humming
by Nell Grey
your fingertips thrum on my shoulder, a gentle tattoo
music from a holy man; I your drum, beat your tattoo
on my inner thigh; a flutter of wings, wounds healed in ink
awake her with your fingers, thumb my butterfly tattoo
see her colours reborn, the flicker of her golden tongue
as she sips the juice of the pink plum blossom. Your tattoo
created only yesterday, for her, for me, your gift,
conceived in love and pain, sweat and coloured ink, come tattoo
me with your fingers, with your nails, sensation's tender marks;
Kiku succumbs to one who bears the hummingbird tattoo
endings, beginnings
by Nell Grey
In a dream I toy with time, white clouds reflect sea blues,
wild cats dance around my feet, Light Programme plays the blues.
Plagiarize myself in ink before I disappear
Rorschach spills across the pad in mackerelled midnight blues.
Hungry silverslips of flesh, cannibal fish invade
insomnia-tangled sheets, painting bites of mottled blues.
I swim the city's morning streets and let you float away
till you've drifted out of sight, dissolved and lost in blues.
Now the colours place themselves, like elvers freed from nets
I am Psyche self-possessed, in nightless, endless blues.
Editor's Comments
"Inshaallah" expresses a fundamental conviction in Islam: all that happens happens as God wills. To my secular mind, it recalls Nietzsche's amor fati, love of one's fate, of what one's life is apart from one's tastes, desires, or will. Somewhat the same idea can be found in the Christian scriptures. Whatever one's beliefs, I trust you can see—enabled by this fine ghazal—something of the psychology of this conviction and the relief to be found in it.
More than one person has pointed out that "rose" can be rearranged to "eros." Darren Coxon's ghazal carries through that decoding of "rose" but in imagery rather than letters. The last sher is especially intriguing as it intertwines rose, dreams, the beloved's body, the ache of sleep, dream, and love.
Ikebana: the Japanese art of flower arrangement; doesn't this suggest that all art is arrangement or depends on arrangement as essential to its being? Consider the ghazal. Both qafiya and radif are repeated elements in the arrangement, with the rest of each sher selected to provide context and contrast to these terms. Placing "gin and sun" with "in the sun" is a very clever and effective shift in parts of speech in the qafiya. And the radif, "sun," really isn't the same in its second use, as the object of "in," as it is as one part of the compound, "gin and sun."
"humming" violates one of the rules of the canonical ghazal: all the shers (with the possible exception of the third) run into the next syntactically. This departure allows Nell Grey to use tattoo as a verb as well as a noun. If you've read much of The Ghazal Page, you know already that I don't insist that the poems I publish follow all the strictures of the traditional form. Please read this poem apart from preconceptions and see how it works for you.
As for elvers . . . .