I was 14 and my sister 16, when my mother sat the both of us down at the kitchen table to announce the divorce from my father. It wasn’t his fault, she said. He sure had his faults, she was quick to add, but the main problem was that she was broken, and she couldn’t go on any longer.
She continued to unwrap a trauma from her childhood that had been swaddled in silence for 35 years. After its shocking revelation, she bound the bundle up tightly once more, so my sister and I both knew never to mention it again.
I read a ghazal by Rebecca Cullen on the Anthropocene website. The poem is a meditation on how we might handle sadness. It made me think of how we dealt with sadness in my family: by bundling it up and never mentioning it again.
This prompted me to compose a ghazal of my own in response to Rebecca’s poem.
Ghazal after Rebecca Cullen My sister called to say her spirits are raining, but someone has swept my sky clean and it is still not raining. My mother speaks of aches and pains in her ageing body, but here clouds are pushed up against the eastern horizon and it is still not raining. My father was eaten by lung carcinoma almost five years ago today, but across the road the beach rose has grown her hips bright and plump and it is still not raining. My doctor called about my test results and I missed the call, but I am undulating like the bramble, following the soil I draw from, and it is still not raining. My friends, all of them, and I, are walking on a floodplain, but seagull-crested silos stretch blue and half-submerged in the asphalt sea and it is still not raining. My heart is starting to know the truth of this life, but I fell into a copse of wild poetry and it is still not raining.
How would you describe this? I feel that it conveys a sense of disconnection from feelings buried deep inside, and how I look to nature and poetry for consolation.
Do you have any favourite poems about sadness? Or favourite ghazals?
It feels like wild grief, how it is also constrained in the words trying to get out.
I read and feel a poignant tension between the consolation of nature & a longing for the relief of a deep, soaking rain. Which will come one day, in its time.