I was invited by Aislinn Clarke, Artistic Director of Wireless Mystery Theatre (Northern Ireland’s only audio theatre company), to take part in WMT's Seamus Heaney Tribute for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, for Nov. 8th.
Below are my submitted poems, which were published on NeverEnding Story:
inner émigré
rolling off my tongue...
the professor's
right eye flickers
in a long shadow
(for more information about Seamus Heaney's concept of inner émigré, see my "Politics/Poetics of Re-Homing, V")
(for more information about Seamus Heaney's concept of inner émigré, see my "Politics/Poetics of Re-Homing, V")
Father recited
Li Po's Quiet Night Thought...
I listen
to Heaney's river
in the trees
Toronto snowstorm...
writing haiku to escape
the fear of silence
(for Seamus Heaney, Poet Of "the Silent Things")
For more information about Seamus Heaney's view of haiku, see my "Dark Wings of Night: Seamus Heaney and His View of Haiku"
Seamus Heaney was sipping bourbon during a Boston snowstorm 30 years ago, trying to explain his poetry as an escape from a terrible fear of silence that always haunted him. “What is the source of our first suffering?” he asked, quoting the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. “It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.”
ReplyDelete-- excerpted from Francis X. Clines's New York Times article, titled Seamus Heaney, Poet of ‘the Silent Things’
For Bernard and Jane McCabe by Seamus Heaney
ReplyDeleteThe riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves.
Us, listening to a river in the trees.
I didn't know about this until now, Chen-ou. Beautiful work.
ReplyDeletemarion
Marion:
DeleteThanks for your kind words.
Chen-ou