Acintya Shenoy, Week #15: i tend to forget
i tend to forget
by Acintya Shenoy
i remember the first day it happened. i am sitting in my great-grandmother’s room,
her only room in the house, the only blue room in the house, the only blue room in
the house with a swing. i am sitting on her lap, on the swing, and her hands are made
of branches. her hands are made of branches, and they are holding me, and they are
singing me a song i don’t understand. they are clasping around my chest and whispering
in my ear and swaying in the wind like a dead man and i don’t understand. i don’t
understand the copper around her wrists, i don’t understand the barklike silk covering
her chest. i don’t understand why she is trying to look me in the eye when i am facing
away from her, sitting on her lap, on the swing. my grandmother walks into the room
and eyes her with pity, then carries me to her lap, and her hands are made of branches,
but there are still a few leaves. i can twist the gold rings that are suffocating the
tributary twigs branching from her knuckles but i can’t pry them off of her. i can’t see
her but i know her femurs are trembling still, but she ignores them and tells me stories
of dead men i don’t understand. she is telling me a story of a dead woman when
my mother hears her name called and enters the room. my mother enters the room and
eyes her with pity, then carries me to her lap, and her hands are branches with leaves on
them. there is a watch on the trunk, the wrist—3 a.m. it must be broken, because she says
my grandmothers should go to sleep, because it’s late, but it can’t be late when it’s
morning. i tell her this but she’s not listening because the women are finally tucked under
white sheets and she’s playing piano music for them. i hold a leafy branch as she leads me out
of the room, my only room in the house, the only blue room in the house, the only blue room
in the house with a swing.
A/N: I began this poem over a year ago. As I reformed and reshaped it into what it looks like now, I noticed that its subject matter and voice are reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Hi Acintya! This poem is beautiful! I always love reading your writings because you have such a unique way of writing that just pulls the reader in and this piece is no different. The repetition of sentences which build on themselves create an elusive tone for your poem and add to the feeling of the recollection of a memory forgotten. Each sentence your memory builds more and more clarity of the facts surrounding the event pulling your readers along with you as we also try to piece together what is occurring. I also love the use of a tree, and its branches, as a symbol for hands. It creates a vivid image of hands, withered with winding veins, like the grooves of trees and their branches. Through these things I can also see the resemblance to the writings of Toni Morrison’s Beloved that you mentioned in your authors note.
ReplyDeleteAs you stated at the end, in your note, this poem was a work in progress for a few years. I wonder how much it has changed since the first draft? Have you noticed any change in voice over the years you have been working on it? I loved this poem and I can’t wait to see what you write next week!
Thank you, Jaycee! This was my first attempt at prose poetry, a style of poetry that looks a lot more like an AP Lang assignment than a poem. I'd been used to a more freeform style of formatting, so confining everything into a paragraph was a challenge for me. I spent quite a bit of time relineating different parts to not only maintain the shape of the paragraph (which unfortunately still widens out in the last few lines) but to also feel purposeful and relevant to the words being expressed. The inability to create a new line wherever I pleased was an interesting limitation that forced me to think carefully about every word I wrote.
DeleteTo be honest, I haven't been writing or reading too much poetry over the past year, so I can't say my style has changed much. Most of my edits have been focused on formatting and lineation. One major development that I can attest to, though, is my affinity for repetition, which I do a lot throughout this poem.
Hi Acintya! You always amaze me with your poetic writing. I’m wondering, what is your process for writing short poems like this? Does an idea randomly pop in your head and you start to write about it, or do you sit down for hours and just.. think? I also used to write poetry, but I never really “got good” at it, so I just kept small poems to myself and I never told anyone because I was insecure in the fear that they wanted to read any of it. Maybe I’ll get back to writing them because I feel like it’s my own diary.
ReplyDeleteI really admire how you illustrate your experience with your great-grandmother and her daughters. I can vaguely remember the times where my grandmother used to carry me, and one key thing I remember is their arms being so incredibly bony and frail. I remember always asking her during meals if that was all she was eating, and seeing the concerned look on my face, she would smile and just say she was not hungry. Even though I didn’t spend much time with my grandparents before they unfortunately passed, I still admire the fragmented memories of their sweet smiles and the way they cared for me by giving me love, comfort, and the best warm hugs ever. Thank you for this amazing blog, Acintya. Thinking about it, maybe I will write a few poems here and there. Hopefully I can write as well as you in the future :)).
Hi Casmin! Thank you! My poems are usually inspired by other creative works. In fact, this poem was inspired by these two excerpts from The Paper Menagerie, a collection of short stories by Ken Liu:
Delete"‘This is mei. It’s the character for "beauty," and America, Meikuo, is the Beautiful Country. See how it’s composed of two characters stacked on top of each other? The one on the top means ‘sheep.’ Can you see the horns of the ram sticking up? The one on the bottom means ‘great,’ and it’s shaped like a person standing up, legs and arms spread out, feeling like a big man.’
[...]
For a variety of reasons, this text does not use pinyin to romanize Chinese. Instead, Mandarin phrases and words are generally romanized using the Wade-Giles system, and Taiwanese Minnan (Fukienese) phrases and words are romanized using either the Pe̍h-ōe-jī system or English phonetic spelling…The art of literomancy is greatly simplified in this story. As well, the folk etymologies and decompositions used here are understood to have little relationship with academic conclusions."
The simplification of complex non-Romantic languages symbolized the loss of cultural nuance and capital over time and migrating generations to me, prompting a poem about losing my connection to my heritage by losing older family members. I like to take a certain theme, aspect, or image in a work I'm inspired by and extrapolate it to create an entirely new work of poetry. I think building off of other's creative works is such an enriching experience and really helps the arts thrive.
I'm so sorry about your grandparents. They sound like incredibly kind and gracious people, and I'm glad that my poem was able to resonate with you. And I'd love to hear or read your poetry! Let me know when you start writing! :)