In this workshop we talked about the experience of getting older, including realising that we are viewed differently by other people compared to when we were younger, but at the same time, often feeling much the same as we did way back when.
The energy and defiance of this first poem by Maya Angelou, with its powerful opening lines, got the conversation started:
When you see me sitting quietly,
Like a sack left on the shelf,
Don’t think I need your chattering.
I’m listening to myself.
Hold! Stop! Don’t pity me!
Hold! Stop your sympathy!
Understanding if you got it,
Otherwise I’ll do without it!
Then we turned to an extract from a wonderful, reflective poem by the American poet John Koethe, called ‘A Private Singularity’. This poem reflects ‘On time — on what it gives, what it destroys, on how it feels’ and these next lines really captured our attention and we spent a good while thinking about them.
Along the way the self that you were born with turns into
The self that you created, but they come together at the end,
United in the memory where time began: the tinkling of a bell
On a garden gate in Combray, or the clang of a driven nail
In a Los Angeles backyard, or a pure, angelic clang in Nova Scotia —
You can learn more about this poet and read the rest of the longer poem here.
Our third poem was familiar to some in the group and is especially brilliant if you are a painter or are interested in light and colour. It prompted lots of reflections about the wisdom of age but also about how we each see the world in our own unique ways and how we perhaps don’t consider this enough. It is called ‘Monet Refuses the Operation’ by Liesel Mueller.
The poem opens with a direct address to a ‘Doctor’, and here the poet is drawing on the fact that Monet did experience sight loss due to cataracts and did indeed refuse to have them operated on.
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
The whole poem, with its wonderful descriptions of light and colour and flux is here.
We decided that next month this would be our topic.
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