The Blue

You can have Egypt and Nantucket.
The only place I want to visit is The Blue,
not the Wild Blue Yonder that seduces pilots,
but that zone where the unexpected dwells,
waiting to come out of it in the shape of bolts.

I want to walk its azure perimeter
where the unanticipated is coiled, on the mark,
ready to spring into the predictable homes of earth.

I want to stroll through the pale indigo light
examining all the accidents about to rocket into time,
all the forgotten names about to fly from tongues.

I will scrutinize all the surprises of the future
and watch the brainstorms gathering darkly,
ready to hit the heads of inventors
laboring in their crackpot shacks.

A jaded traveler with an invisible passport,
I am at home with this heaven of the unforeseen,
waiting for the next whoosh of sudden departure
when, with no advance warning, to tiny auguery,
the unpredictable plummets into our lives
from somewhere that looks like sky.

~ Billy Collins ~

(The Apple That Astonished Paris)

 Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/The_Blue.html

Via Slate Magazine

Meghan O’Rourke writes:

Prisons have always been surprisingly fruitful places for the production of poetry. But the detention center at Guantánamo Bay would have seemed an exception, since its purpose was the isolation and sequestration of high-level “enemy combatants.” They wrote, rather, to pass the time—as consolation, as memorial, as a way of giving shape to an incarceration that stretched indefinitely onward.

The results of this [the detainees] labor are now available in a slim volume, Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (University of Iowa), edited by Marc Falkoff, a law professor who has done pro bono work for detainees. Containing a mere 22 poems by 17 inmates, Poems From Guantánamo brings us voices from a place that has been characterized by silence and obscurity.

In “To My Father,” by Abdullah Thani Faris Al Anazi, the poet writes:

O Father, this is a prison of injustice.
Its iniquity makes the mountains weep.
I have committed no crime and am guilty of no offense.
Curved claws have I,
But I have been sold like a fattened sheep.

Yes there is a problem in interpreting this poem and others by the Guantanamo detainees. As in the poem above, what does “curved claws” mean? In an otherwise sensitive poem of protestation, “curved claws” hits a note of violence? predation? So we are drawn to the poetry and put off by it at the same time.

Robert Pinsky, our nation’s former poet laureate has said, these are ”not particularly distinguished or wonderful poems.” They are instead ”urgent” texts that address the human rights issues that the Guantanamo imprisonments raise. And, he adds, they do so “in a way that is characteristic of the art of poetry.”

You can read more in a San Francisco Chronicle article.

Here is Robert Pinsky on the Guantanamo poetry.

Another particularly affecting example of the poetry:

Death Poem by Jumah al Dossari
Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors or [sic] peace.”

Jumah al Dossari is a thirty-three-year old Bahraini who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for more than five years. He has been in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and, according to the U.S. military, has tried to kill himself twelve times while in custody.

maryt