Tag: Saved

• Learning Life by Soul

  Here is another section of Kim Rosen’s book, “Saved by a Poem” that I loved.

  “Have you ever had the experience of a friendship or a romance where it seemed like life had finally brought you the perfect person, whose tastes and beliefs and dreams matched yours, whom you were so connected with that you didn’t even have to speak? And then, after a month or three of this Eden, you inevitably began to realize your differences. It turned out that when it came right down to it, he didn’t actually share the same beliefs as you, and what matter most to you made him very nervous. Maybe she seemed to like your kind of music in the beginning, but later admitted it gave her the creeps. Suddenly one morning you wake up, look your beloved in the face and say, “Who are you? You weren’t like this when we fell in love!”

  At this point, the difference is sometimes too great to survive. You separate from each other. Or you deaden the aliveness of the relationship, relegating your togetherness to what small corner of the connection does not rock the boat.

  If you hand in there without fleeing or numbing your heart you may discover more about who you really are than you ever imagined. Your beliefs may be shaken and your masks may crumble. You might discover a connection with your partner that is not contingent on harmony and agreement.

  The same is true of a relationship with a poem. If you are willing to get curious about what is triggering your judgments instead of abandoning the poem or changing it to fit your comfort zone, you may find that the very lines that give you trouble hold the key to undiscovered layers of your own nature.

  Gina’s favorite poem was from Rilke’s Book of Hours. She carried it on a tattered index card in her purse and often pulled it out to read to friends. She was excited about deepening her relationship with it and came to my workshop with the intention of doing so.

  But as she began the process, she balked. Suddenly she decided she didn’t like the poem anymore. Another poem, Robert Frost’s “West-running Brook,” got very attractive to her. “The whole song of that poem is rushing through me,” she said. “I can’t concentrate on the Rilke.” She felt torn, drawn to the Frost poem but trapped by her commitment to the Rilke, even though she was no longer in love with it.

  She could have been describing a romantic struggle. She admitted that this feeling of being torn was a familiar refrain in her life, played out again and again in her relationships with men: as soon as the time came to do the work of going deeper, someone else showed up who became very compelling.

  I asked Gina where she was stuck in the Rilke poem. She pointed to the lines “Each thing -/ each stone, blossom, child-/ is held in place.”

  “Was that your experience as a child?” I asked.

  “No. I didn’t feel held. Each stone, blossom, child is not held in place,” she whimpered. “The poem is lying!” She and I both knew this was a deeply buried voice, drawn to surface by the poem.

  “Why did you originally love this poem?” I asked her.
  “Because I so long to be held like that. I long for that feeling of being safe on earth. But right now, I don’t believe in it.” She was choking back sobs. “I was so alone as a child. My great uncle abused me and nobody knew. I felt like I was living behind an invisible shield. My mom didn’t notice because she was so self-involved and distracted. I ended up taking care of her, hoping I could make her strong enough to take care of me.”

  Gina was rocking back and forth, her own arms wrapped tightly around her.

  “To really make this poem your own,” I said to her, “you may need to let yourself go through these feelings. Are you willing?”

  Reluctantly Gina began to repeat the line over and over. At first we could barely hear her. But as she allowed the waves of pain to come to surface, her voice became stronger.

  “It’s true, I have such a longing to be ‘held in place’ by something bigger than me,” she whispered. “I want to know what Rilke felt when he wrote this line.”

  “So I invite you to be ‘held in place’ by your commitment to this poem. Don’t get distracted like your mother did. Don’t go off to another poem. Hold yourself right here, as a healing to the unheld one within you.”

  Even through her tears, Gina knew that this poem was the exact medicine she needed to heal the heartbroken child who was so disillusioned by what had happened to her. She had unconsciously prescribed it for herself. Now it was drawing out a trauma that had been buried since she was very young. And even as this poem opened Gina’s wound, it gave her the perfect balm to heal it.

  Kim Rosen

  The line I love is I ended up taking care of her, hoping I could make her strong enough to take care of me.

  This is the ditch that most abused victims fall into, where they are diligently caring for people in order for them to eventually become strong enough to take care of us, become our heroes, bring us the love we know is there IF only they were strong enough to show it.

  Imagine the little one trying to take care of the adult, while the child needs to be held in place by someone bigger.

  The world is a scary place where you the child is the caretaker.

  Love this book….

  She speaks of the poems first settling in the mind being memorized, then moving into the heart and then unearthing feelings deep within, speaking the soul’s language.

  During my journey I too felt that I would get things first in my head, then my heart would recognize it, and then finally my soul resounded in knowing.

  She calls this knowing them by heart.

  I feel I am knowing life by soul.

  November 21, 2010

  a, by, by heart, Kim, learning, Poem, Rilke, Rosen, Saved

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• The Journey….

  In Kim Rosen’s book, “Saved by a Poem” she writes,

  “ I discovered how the separating lines of culture and age can dissolve in the presence of a poem the first time I went to Africa. In Kenya, at the Tasaru Ntomonok Rescue Centre for Girls in the Rift Valley, I unexpectedly found myself speaking a poem to a group of Maasai girls, only a few hours after I met them. I had long wanted to visit this miraculous place, ever since it was opened by Eve Ensler and her organization V-Day in collaboration with Agnes Pareyio, a Maasai woman who dedicates her life to stopping the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). Tasaru, also called the V-Day Safe House, was created as a haven for girls escaping FGM. Fifty or so girls live at the house at any given time. Each has had to leave her family and community. Many have traveled alone for miles, barefoot over rough roads, spending nights hiding under the bushes for fear of being found by wild animals.
  My first few hours there were awkward. My shyness kept me from striking up conversations with the girls, most of whom though they understood English, did not speak it willingly. They were shy with me too, keeping their distance and watching me in twos and threes, whispering in Maa (the language of the Maasai) and giggling.

  Finally I decided to go over to the kitchen, where I heard a lively singing as a group cooked ugali (Porridge made of cornmeal) and cabbage over an open fire. I listened outside as the last song dissolved into gales of laughter and a cacophony of exclamations in Maa. But the chatter instantly hushed when I walked in. A tall girl who spoke excellent English came up to me and stood directly in front of me: “Do you remember my name?”

  I didn’t. I had been introduced to about 20 girls in the last couple of hours and could not for the life of me remember which beautiful Maasai face went with which name.
  “Salula?” I asked sheepishly, grabbing the only name I remembered. “No!” The girls shrieked with laughter at what must have been a big mistake on my part. “That is Salula!” They pointed at one of the youngest girls, who had arrived at the Safe House only months before at the age of 9, having been rescued in the midst of a forced marriage to a 42 year-old man.

  “I am Jecinta.” The tall girl spoke to me with exaggerated patience, as if to a two year old. “Do you know any songs?” Clearly she was giving me an opportunity to redeem myself.

  “I know some songs,” I said. “But what I really love most is poetry.”
  “I write poems.” An older girl with exquisitely chiseled features and piercing eyes was looking at me intently from behind a huge cauldron of steaming cabbage. She was dressed with more sophistication that the others, wearing a tight sleeveless shirt and matching short skirt that made her look more woman than girl. I noticed her gold necklace and earrings as they glinted in the light of the cooking fire.

  “Do you know any of them by heart? Can you recite any of them here?” I asked.

  “I am too shy to do that.” Her beautiful accent made even this simple statement sound like poetry. “I cannot.”

  “May I recite a poem to you?” I asked her. “Then maybe after you will want to recite yours to me.”

  She nodded. Suddenly I panicked. What poem might these girls relate to? I pored through the archive in my mind. Not one seemed remotely appropriate. Their life experience was so different from mine.

  The kitchen became strangely silent. The clatter of washing and cooking had ceased. The whispering and giggling that had been a constant soundtrack in the background was quiet. All the girls stopped their work and were waiting for my poem.
  Out of nowhere “The Journey” by Mary Oliver, a poem I hadn’t thought of in months, burst to mind. Without even taking the time to run through it silently to see if it was appropriate, I began speaking: “One day you finally knew / what you had to do.”

  The poem is about leaving home, turning away from the many voices that demand that you stay, risking the anguish of those who need and love you, and walking alone into a wild night in order to save “the only life you can save.” The girls listened, transfixed. Each of them had lived through such a turning point. Each of them, at a very young age, had defied tribal tradition and left her parents, friends, and community to save her own life. Who could understand these lines better than they?

  It is difficult to describe what happened in that crowded smoky kitchen as I delivered the poem. There I was, a white, middle-class American woman, speaking words written by another white, middle-class American woman, surrounded by Maasai girls who had grown up in tribal villages in the Rift Valley, in families so poor that two cows their parents would get when they gave their daughter to an old man in marriage were their only hope of a better life.

  But as “The Journey” filled the kitchen, there was no separation between us. We were transported into a timeless, placeless, languageless realm where we were the same. By the end of poem, tears were running down my face and several of the girls were crying as well. Several of them dove toward me, wrapping their arms around my waist. There was a long silence. The Jecinta asked, “Who is this woman, Mary Oliver? Is she Maasai?”

  I shook my head, barely able to speak. “American,” I whispered. “Mzungu. Like Me.”

  “How did she know?”

  In the silence that answered her question, the girl with the gold necklace and piercing eyes came from behind the cauldron of cabbage into the center of the dirt floor.

  “I am ready to say my poem,” she announced.

  In a single wave, the other girls and I moved to one side of the kitchen, spontaneously creating a stage among boiling pots of food.

  “I am just a girl child.” Her voice was surprisingly strong, pulsing with a natural rhythm as contagious as any slam poet’s vibe. “It sounds good but oh no-/ To my father I’m just a source of income.” She continued through the list: her mother who sees her only as a “beast of burden,” the boys at school who objectify her beauty, and “the sugar daddy,” for whom she was just “a juicy fruit to be eaten raw.” The poem ends with the wise and heartbreaking question, “Who cares for me?”

  By now there were about two dozen girls packed into the smoky kitchen or leaning in the windows. As the poet spoke her final question, we all cheered and burst into applause. I looked around the crowd that had gathered. Most girls were melted into each other, their arms draped around their friends. Two girls had maneuvered me into the space between them; one rested her head on my shoulder. For a long moment of silence gazed at each other through the smoke, our eyes full of light.

  In these moments of poetic communion when life comes into a harmony, miracles happen organically: the stroke victim’s brain starts making new synaptic connections; a sense of uncanny peace and joy pervades the Freedom Space as bombs explode in the surrounding streets; the armed Sunni soldier embraces the Shiite poet in tears of joy to discover they feel the same grief and longing; a runaway Maasai girl hears her own story told by a white
  American writer, and she is empowered to find her own voice. When you speak a poem that is written in the language of your soul, you become a voice for the heart in the world, and everyone around you is blessed by a sudden grace.
  Kim Rosen

  The Journey

  One day you finally knew
  what you had to do, and began,
  though the voices around you
  kept shouting
  their bad advice —
  though the whole house
  began to tremble
  and you felt the old tug
  at your ankles.
  “Mend my life!”
  each voice cried.
  But you didn’t stop.
  You knew what you had to do,
  though the wind pried
  with its stiff fingers
  at the very foundations,
  though their melancholy
  was terrible.
  It was already late
  enough, and a wild night,
  and the road full of fallen
  branches and stones.
  But little by little,
  as you left their voices behind,
  the stars began to burn
  through the sheets of clouds,
  and there was a new voice
  which you slowly
  recognized as your own,
  that kept you company
  as you strode deeper and deeper
  into the world,
  determined to do
  the only thing you could do —
  determined to save
  the only life you could save.

  ~ Mary Oliver ~

  November 20, 2010

  a, by, connections, girl, Inner, joining, journey, Kim Rosen, Mary Oliver, Poem, Saved, soul, The, women

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• Tree In Tree

  By Deena Metzger

  “I am no longer afraid of mirrors where I see the sign of the amazon, the one who shoots arrows.
  There was a fine red line across my chest where a knife entered,
  but now a branch winds about the scar and travels from arm to heart.
  Green leaves cover the branch, grapes hang there and a bird appears.
  What grows in me now is vital and does not cause me harm. I think the bird is singing.
  I have relinquished some of the scars.
  I have designed my chest with the care given to an illuminated manuscript.
  I am no longer ashamed to make love. Love is a battle I can win.
  I have the body of a warrior who does not kill or wound.
  On the book of my body, I have permanently inscribed a tree.”
  Deena

  Today while delivering mail, I listened to the CD that accompanies the book, “Saved by a Poem” by Kim Rosen.

  There were many poems, or lines in the poems that spoke to me, but the image of this one stuck with me.

  If you go to her website, http://www.deenametzger.com you will see a fabulous woman who is fully embracing I M Perfect.

  She had a mastectomy and placed a tattoo upon the scar…

  November 16, 2010

  a, by, deena, imperfection, in, Kim, mastectomy, metzger, perfect, Poem, Rosen, Saved, tatoo, tree, women

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• Love after Love, by Derek Walcott

  The time will come

  when, with elation,

  you will greet yourself arriving

  at your own door,

  in your own mirror,

  and each will smile at the other’s welcome

  and say, sit here. Eat.

  You will love again the stranger who was your self.

  Give wine. Give bread.

  Give back your heart

  to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

  all your life, whom you ignored

  for another, who knows you by heart.

  Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

  the photographs, the desperate notes,

  peel your own image from the mirror.

  Sit. Feast on your life.

  —Derek Walcott

  I heard this recited by Kim Rosen on Sirius Radio with Ed Bacon, she wrote a book called, “Saved by a Poem”. I have it on hold at the library. Until then, I have browsed her website and found this poem.

  October 18, 2010

  a, after, Bacon, by, Derek, Ed, Kim, love, Oprah, Poem, radio, Rosen, Saved, series, sirius, soul, Walcott

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