The little girl I baby-sit insists . . .
Red Ghazal, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Humankind arrives, green disappears from the face
Of the land, cut and burned away from the forest face.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Fails to hold its place in the onslaught on our planet’s face.
. . . her giant book of dinosaurs is the only one she’ll ever read.
Guiltless in their extinction, we have no power to erase tears from her face.
Science teaches us that dinosaurs were more than green or brown.
Imagine one with feathers the color of orchid petals around its face.
Lie down in green pastures, even in the valley of the shadow of death,
Find a leaf here, a leaf there, hidden in each shadowed cliff-face.
Words that begin with the letter g: Garbage, glib, gloomy, glum, graceless,
Green, groan, growl, grunt, guilty. I grieve and pull a veil across my face.
“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” Dylan Thomas
“Red Ghazal,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Psalm 23:2”
I was entranced by Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “Red Ghazal.” It occurred to me that my love of color made this the ideal starting place for a series of ghazals that I could add to whenever a color captured my attention or I couldn’t figure out what else to write about. Endless color names, endless inspiration. At one time there were early drafts for three saved to my desktop.
They were fun to write, pulling in literary illusions and quotes from sources as varied as books on the history of colors and songs. I tried experiments in short lines, long lines, and three-line stanzas (The Bly variation). I replaced a repeated word or phrase in the second line of each couplet with a rhyme. That was one of my least successful adaptations, especially when I was working with short lines. There were fourteen of them before my short attention span wandered off to other projects.
My technicolor dreams died. On reading over them several months later, I realized the difference between unsupervised play and crafting a poem someone else would want to read. There were times that the couplets went beyond being unrelated to being drawn from cultures that had little in common. Their strongest lines were often the concluding ones.
In my shock, I may have been unnecessarily unkind, which is never a productive reaction. Don’t get me wrong, I do go back and revise my work. But when looking abject failure in the eye, I had little stomach for it. (God mixing metaphors can be a blast!) Chartreuse waits to be rescued and restored to its rightful place.
Comments