Nothing Lost

Dad grave, Cornish slate.

There seems to be a wholly different language and vocabulary around poetry and creating to the point where I’m thinking ‘this is not something I can connect with, or ‘do’. However, I will continue to read the book somebody kindly lent me recently. Here is a quote which does ‘ring’, somewhat.

It is not any moment, but this very moment, that a Japanese poem contemplates and preserves; not any feeling, but the emotion pressed like wine from its underlying events. And there are underlying events – behind almost every tanka stands the essence of a particular story, a set of circumstances.
From Nine Gates, Entering – The Mind of Poetry by Jane Hirshfield

emotion pressed like wine from its underlying events. For me, emotion is welded to the event. No amount of pressing is going to sever the feeling from the underlying event since all of one’s senses are invoked. Recalling the circumstances surrounding my father’s death for example. It played out like a movie both at the time and now – filled with pathos yet from one place removed. Not exactly detached, that would be cold, more both in the film and watching it at the same time. I’m not having a problem with that.

Triumphantly
he died
beating the odds
He won!
Nothing lost.

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