“I have been writing poetry since I was a little girl. I became a scholar, a wife, a mother, an old woman – and hovered in an ambiguous world of riddling opposites, that I tenaciously tried to capture in the fusion of word and image – lullabies of thought and image – that was like a chariot, a vessel that could hold life itself. Like Basho, I knew no other way, than the way of poetry.”
When a word is born as a dragonfly…
When a word is born as a dragonfly,
it snags memories, myths and metaphors
with razor-sharp mandibles from mid-air -
in calculated aerial ambushes
with a keen stare in slow motion
and a ferocious dare to feast on gnats.
Oh! may my words be born as these freaky fliers
with marvellous multifaceted eyes -
to perceive the ultraviolet
on the top of blue, red and green
hunting the elusive human dream
of resting in the hovering.
Dragonfly flight - Senryu 5-7-5
when a word is born
as a dragonfly, it snags
meaning from mid-air
words are freaky fliers
rustling an old-paper sound
in their dragonfly flight
Quote
“Writing down these thoughts, I realise that “the only thing worth falling in love with, is the word itself” – that writing has become a way to hunt shadows, mine and the collective; continually researching, exploring, peering at the periphery, figuring out the edge of things, attempting to catch glimpses of changing and illusionary forms; pinning them down like dead butterflies on parchment with existing words, made-up words and sounds, with the fusion of words and images, looking through a macro camera-lens into the microscopic wonders of textures and writhing life, to catch the untouched and perhaps untouchable shadows in myself and the collective”.
(In Carrying Sand to the River)
