Roll over, Sarojini Naidu, here comes Blog #2

I set aside the Haiku Noodles for a while, when I started finding poetry I had written as a teenager, in old diaries. This one is not quite "proper" poetry, but I just had to share it with the world! I had just turned 16, and was in the 11th Standard at school. While sick in bed with jaundice, I got quite creative and wrote this spoof on Sarojini Naidu's beautiful poem "Coromandel Fishers". I also remember writing and illustrating a spoof on Jonathan Livingston Seagull; it was the story of Felix Uriah Cockroach, who only wanted to sing. It ended tragically, in a bathtub (he risked all for better acoustics). Alas, that remarkable piece of writing was lost forever in 1985. Here then, is all that remains, the first verse of "Bathroom Cleaners" written on August 26, 1981:

Rise, brothers, rise!
The wakening skies
fill with factory smoke.
The cockroaches lie at the side of the road
along with the beggar folk.
Come let us gather our
brooms from the floor
and take hold of a scrubbing brush -
To kill the germs inside the pot
for we are the sons of the flush.

Back from the burnout.

No, not me.Years of therapy, medication and introspection have put paid to burnout. My life is now one long happy sabbatical. Alas, my computer monitor was not so fortunate. But all is well now and I am back to noodling with the old haikus. Here's one I came up with, courtesy my Californian magnetic poetry set:

Rocky seas of pain
Cried over with rose water.
Salt dissolves, stone stays.

I like it. For me, it relates to childhood abuse, and how healing can take away the sting, although the original scar can never be totally erased, only cleansed as much as it can, and then accepted.

Learning from Forrest's grandfather.

We're always on some path. Every breath is another step forward, right? Yet we're so focused on where we're going, or where we want to be. I'm beginning to see that the travelling is more important than the arrival, and that seeking inward is more rewarding than seeking outward.

This is pilgrimage.
Journeying not to, but with.
Destination: me.

I'm reading a wonderful children's book, The Education of Little Tree; a true story by Forrest Carter, who was raised by his Cherokee (Native American) grandparents, and there is a lot in that book to inspire me. The grandfather - what a grand grandfather he must have been. I'm awed by the wisdom of his spirituality, I'm humbled by the depth in the simplicity of his ways.

Afterthought: why must the original inhabitants of that continent be called "Native" Americans? Why aren't they called Americans, and the others called Immigrant Americans? They were there from the first. Every one else arrived.