A space for everyone

Dearest Hugh

Thank you for wanting to hear me read my poems and for introducing me to Off The Wall.
Thank you for encouraging me to write a verse novel and for publishing it - for involving me so closely with the bold experiment of serialising a contemporary verse novel. It was a superb experience!

Thank you for writing me a reference for a creative arts fellowship.

I wish I could have fulfilled your wish to publish The Griffin Elegy as a complete set.

I wish I could have fulfilled your wish to hear it more in performance.

Thank you, Hugh, for believing in my poetry.

Thank you for being a friend - a critical friend, a natural friend, a poetry friend.

Thank you for all your precious sms poems, which showed so plainly how woven into everyday life our poems are. 

For being kind to Norman, to the Eastern Cape poets, to different kinds of voices. 

For being so very supportive of Lewis - his five books would not have come about without you.

For inviting everybody to read in the language of their choice - from Sweden to Argentina and back home.

For giving a space to everyone - from pastors to bergies - at Off The Wall.

I was so happy when you and Julia found each other.

I have been sad to see you unwell and suffering. 

May you travel well, as your soul unfolds its further mysteries.

Love from

'Silkiness!' ... as you always, with a smile, called me, always, somehow, in a tone of surprise.

Gratitude and your own, mad song

In what were probably some of the darkest times of my adult existence, I was obliged frequently to sojourn in the Eastern Cape frontier town, Grahamstown (privately and helpfully nicknamed Grimsberg during those years).

When in Grimsberg, I must do shopping.

I used to go to a little complex, called Peppergrove Mall. The front of the Pick 'n Pay there is roofed, and a part of the area is marked, by a railing, containing shopping trolleys. There used to be a slender, youngish man there, who wiped the handles of the trolleys for each customer, with sanitising wipes, which he nimbly reached over to pull out of a bucket with a hole in the top.

Not only did the man's helpfulness make the act of extracting a wipe, and sanitising my own trolley handle, unnecessary for me to do. He also wiped my grimy soul, by filling me each time with wonder.

For, on each occasion, without fail, when I fetched a trolley and greeted him, and asked him how he was, he would reply -

"I am alive! I am so grateful to God that I have today, and that is why I am happy!"

His fervour never waned, his line never changed.

When circumstances altered, and I no longer needed to frequent Grimsberg, I made a point of going especially to thank him for so liberally tossing his good cheer into my days. I am not sure that he recognised me, for I had not been coming to the town regularly anymore, and he looked, perhaps, a little nonplussed.

"You made a difference to my life," I told him, "it was a difficult time for me, and your thankfulness for being alive always meant so much."

I did not get the impression that my thanks made a difference to him. I don't think he needed it.

I never bothered to find out his name, or to make conversation with him - he did not exactly open himself up to conversation - and so, other feelings, which I could have had, such as pity for his station; or guilt and shame about the differences between us; or worry about his well-being - none of those feelings stood a chance with him.

Here was a king, as the German folk round sings it -

Froh zu sein bedarf es wenig                                        To be happy one needs very few things
und wer froh ist, ist ein Koenig.                                    and the one who is happy is a king.

One sees many memes, which highly recommend the trolley-handle-wiper's attitude of gratitude in practice. But you have to be wild to do it - wild enough to know your life can be snatched from you at any moment, wild enough to know that all you have is NOW; wild enough to be mad enough to sing your song as wholeheartedly and as wholesomely as you possibly can. And thus, the trolley-handle-wiper's song is humbling and no doubt an example for all to follow.

Hah, and there's the rub!
YOUR song is not the trolley-handle-wiper's song.
Your song is NOT the song of A.A. Milne or Piglet or Pooh Bear in the accompanying, famous illustration below.

Personally, I would have to exercise brute force on myself in order to do for somebody else what that lovely youngish man did for me. The sheer horror of having to tell myself (never mind somebody else) daily that I am happy to be alive is enough for instantaneous gloom to pour itself out within me and spread depression diligently through my system over the next five weeks. Why? Because I would be forcing myself to do something utterly monotonous to my spirit - the words would not spring up naturally out of my heart as they did out of his.

I surprise myself over and again by how fluid I am: how, not seldom, the cornucopia of disappointments and sorrows, which my life has generously granted, seem far too heavy for me to carry. Despite the fact that I am richly blessed with joys AND am grateful for them, I flop UNGRATEFULLY like wet clay back into default position, i.e. flat dust, which not even the wind can whip into a prettty storm, because this thing is way too waterlogged.

That is the moment when you become grateful for tears. Or just for honesty. Or for the teeth you're gritting all over again. And, at last, you really do resolve to make that appointment with the dentist. Tomorrow.

Photo acknowledgment: Saeed Al Jafar from Kuwait in the Masai Mara, Kenya. 'The end of a cheetah yawn'.

Articulating chaos

There are times when the chaos is overwhelming, the tasks too physically demanding, the tangles of relationships too complicated, the past too heavy.

At such times, your hands may not dance over the keyboard. They are diverted from the pen. The notebook, the journal, social media pages, your blogsite - all venues for reflection are pushed aside by the crisis. You are in emergency mode.

Moving house is always a crisis. Moving from the house of your late husband, who lived in it for thirty years, is unspeakable. Truths reside here, which hurt beyond words. You carry them as you must.

You are in a state of permanent shock. Day after day your hands sort, toss, choose, wrap, pack, tape, label, stack.

You are not alone. You have been sent a Beloved, whose kind words and jokes, whose strong arms and able hands you depend on utterly.
You are grateful.
You rise in the night to make order on the page, but your poems are a jumble.
You forgive yourself, are patient.

You pray for the boomslang in the creeper on the chimney. May his life be spared when the pest eradicators come to gas the borer beetles.
Your heart is slow and vulnerable as a slug.

 

Praise is not only sweet

Like honey, genuine praise is not only sweet, but also nourishing and even medicinal.

My mother over the phone yesterday told me she is really enjoying the poems in Greater Matter; indeed, the story they tell is keeping her in suspense.

For many people, it may go without saying that your mother praises you, but that is not an experience I share: my mother was always not only highly exacting, but brutally honest in her responses to the things we - and she herself, too - created. That is why her praise now is both nourishing and medicinal.

Added to this is that, since her stroke, she has a slight reading disability. The poems, since they do not run across the entire page, do not tax her eyes to move more than is comfortable. The daughter in me is eternally grateful, for completely extraneous reasons, now to be a poet!

Greater Matter also received unexpected praise from a recent Air b&b host, who ended up buying the kindle version. Amazon won't allow him to post his review, because his purchases are less than a minimum amount stipulated by them. He has kindly given me permission to post it on the social media:

"Hi Silke. We got the book on kindle. Honest, sweet and raw. Reading a bit every night. A rare find these days. Thanks very much for putting pen to paper and actually publishing these intimate thoughts and experiences. If you never did that, something would have been lacking in my life." - Paul van Jaarsveld, Jeffrey's Bay

If you would like to buy the book, you may email me directly for a mail order, at silkeheiss@gmail.com
Alternately, you can find it on  https://www.amazon.com/Greater-Matter-Journey-Poems-Beyond/dp/0994695071

I put out the third Give Your Writing The Edge Nugget yesterday, containing a beautiful, hitherto unpublished poem by Norman Morrissey, expressing the idea that the things we make are incarnations of our spirit. This thought is truly wind in the sails of my book - a thing, which is from start to finish a gift dedicated to his immortal soul.

No delight as great

As we are putting together this year's Ecca Poets publication, I have the privilege of  immersing myself in the rhythms of my fellow poets' thoughts and feelings. The waters of their words are alternatingly cool and warm, refreshing and cleansing in their truths. 
The best cure for a doubting writer is to read her betters - there is no delight as great as that of looking up to humble folk.

Tuesday tidy-up by Tortoise

There is a calm. Pleasant and unfamiliar.

I've revised my Timeline at the end of my book; applied the changes suggested by one of my beady-eyed editors; and emailed the other editors saying I need their final input by mid-April, so the proofreader has enough time to work his miracles before I submit the manuscript to PoeTree.

In all my years as a writer (I made a start in 1974) I've never published anything in this way before: I have no solo publication with an ISBN number, nor anything loaded on Amazon.

I breathe a sigh of relief at my vegetative slowness: I like myself being this late. It is wonderful being a slow developer. My disappointments, failures, resentments, frustrations, hopelessnesses, madnesses, despairs, depressions, manias and resignations have made the most extraordinary compost: it is soft and warm with my failures, my traumas, my giving-upnesses over and over again, having to gather my broken bones and reconstruct my self and my life.

Upon this compost of psychic energy I am now carried forward - by the force of my own shit, you could say ... transformed over the decades into a mysterious source of quiet, something is happening, which I've been dreaming almost since birth. Or before. Who knows?

I am producing a 'real' book. A book with an ISBN number, which I will market properly and make available to online buyers.

This is truly nothing special. The book industry is a zillion ants in their antheaps, and there are only so many ant-eaters about to devour them.

And yet, like the birth of any living baby, my book has its own bright star. As it currently stands, there are 238 poems carrying the narrative - the journey with my husband to his death and beyond. The poems are like 238 survivors of the 1000 eggs the Tortoise I am has laid in the sand over the past 20 months, with the patient sun of time now finally close to hatching them.

I am grateful. Keeping close to earth.

Photo: Silke Heiss

   

A confession - from depression to gratitude again

To my discredit I did not survive my stay in Somerset West intact. I returned home to Hogsback to suffer an immediate nervous breakdown so acute that I had to pull out of the Summer Songs & Poems gig this past Sunday. Every other minute a traumatic thought or memory would surface, reducing me to sobs. I did not recognise either my art or my books as mine. Weak and incapacitated by a dark film between myself and my surrounds, I was too hollow to pray and too numb to count blessings. My desperate mouthings of  'God be with me' were mechanical and seemed useless.

My son was still with me. Thirsty and hungry, I finally summoned the courage to whatsapp him in his room.
'Please would you make me a cup of tea?'
He knocked and opened my door and informed me that he had not dared disturb me earlier, since "When an adult's door is closed, you don't disturb. I mean, you're my mom, so you knock and can come in, but it doesn't work the other way round."
That made for a new and interesting bit of information.
He made me tea and toast and, with a touching degree of youthful awkwardness (he will be 21 soon), observed that he did not understand what was happening, but -
"Just let it out. I mean, physically you're ok, aren't you?"
"Yes ... I think the Disprin is helping that ominous pain at the back of my head."
"You were so happy to be back."
"I was."
"So what happened?"
"I think being back means I'm allowed to just do nothing."
"Well I do nothing all the time. It's the best."
"Yes."
"So just let it out."
"I am."

He told me that he felt that he was incapable of breaking down. It is true that he is profoundly blessed with psychic health. While concerned for me, he was utterly unfazed by my floods of tears, which I could no longer hide. He spoke with such casual humour that he made me start to laugh, and I grew aware of how deeply grateful I am for his existence.

I began to hear the young Chorister Robin - a character like no other, this season, for his hilarious, exuberant liltings - and the other birds again.

The next day I could already visit my neighbours again with thanks for checking up on the house during my absence; and thank my fellow performers for picking up the tab for me - adding songs at the last minute to fill out the programme, so that most of the audience had not even noticed my absence!

Only yesterday evening did I finally take myself to Norman's Memorial spot and saw that the gardeners had, during my absence, weeded it beautifully, leaving only the flowering weeds to decorate it exactly as Norman and I would have wished. The love they'd put in to welcoming me back radiated out of the cleared circle. The two little Yellowwoods on the circumference had produced further sprouts.

And then, this morning, I finally put pen to paper again to produce a poem I knew was waiting for me to write it, in gratitude to one of the members of the St Patrick's Chapel congregation in Hogsback.

Here it is.

Kindness
Dedicated to my anonymous donor

By deeds we are
that which we are -

words, too, when finely wrought,
can act - do good or harm
in human hearts -
can provide balm,
boost courage,
project

a beam
of purest light

- such as this humble poem
seeks to do -
to stream thanks
and honour
to a donor of mine
for her kindness.

- Silke Heiss, 9th January 2019 

Privilege

Composed alive

Gratitude

I've just written, and published, the words for the Gratitude page on my website ... that virtual house of mine still under construction - arguably the space given to gratitude constitutes the most important room in any building!

Click here to enter this room!