#charara

Lucía Mora, cantante, locutora y creadora de contenido musical, está despegando su carrera como artista. Con una trayectoria multifacética, esta joven madrileña de 23 años combina su pasión por la música con su experiencia en los escenarios y en los medios de comunicación, destacándose por su capacidad de conectar con el público a través de su arte y carisma. Ha compartido escenario con artistas…

2020 NPM #20: Elegy with Apples, Pomegranates, Bees, Butterflies, Thorn Bushes, Oak, Pine, Warblers, Crows, Ants, and Worms

Today we are at the 2/3 mark, talking about American poet Hayan Charara (1951-). My first impression, before I read past the title, was that of a Salvador Dali painting. But that is a superficial view. This is a poem you have to read twice. The first word in the title is the important one. This is a stream of conscious thought that may seem random on the surface, but is, on second look, very focused.

Charara was born to Lebanese parents in Detroit where he also did his undergraduate studies. He went on to NYU and then received his PhD in Houston. He has published three volumes of poetry.  His poems are edgy, pointed and thought provoking. A voice of coping with unfortunate, often patently unfair realities.  Animals is a very good example of that voice (I will forewarn you it is an uncomfortable read) but today, instead, I have chosen to talk about Elegy with Apples, Pomegranates, Bees, Butterflies, Thorn Bushes, Oak, Pine, Warblers, Crows, Ants, and Worms.

An elegy is generally a thoughtful poem in remembrance of someone who has passed on from this life. And that is what Charara’s poem is, interweaving observational metaphors with the inevitable realities of life, and the detours our minds sometimes take a we try to focus on something difficult, something painful. 

There are parallel threads here, but the main idea, evolved throughout the poem, is the idea that all things speak to you, if you are mindful enough to understand them. What they are teaching you is that life is change, life is transient, cyclical:

The trees alongside the fence bear fruit, the limbs and leaves speeches to you and me. They promise to give the world back to itself. 

Their instructions, their lessons, interweave with, and evolve into, a human voice.

The thorn bushes instruct us to tell our sons and daughters who carry sticks and stones to mend their ways. The oak tree says to eat only fruits and vegetables;

There is a purposefully rambling nature to the  way Charara’s threads of thought wander, as the mind wanders,  trying to remember something or get to the eventual, painful conclusion:

The mantra today is the same as yesterday. We must become different. The plants must, the animals, and the ants and worms, just like the carmakers, the soap makers before them, and the manufacturers of rubber

The conclusion is simple, and heartfelt - the remembrance of loss:

Such an ancient habit, making ourselves new. My neighbor looks like my mother who left a long time ago and did not hear any of this. Just for a minute, give her back to me, before she died, kneeling in the dirt under the sun, calling me darling in Arabic, which no one has since.

Read it through. Its not very long. I interpret it as being a person who internalizes (or tries to internalize) his emotions, but everything around him is a reminder, a trigger, leading him back to the same point.  The same memory. The same realization.  Charara uses a different process to revisit the same tone in Older, the last poem on the linked page.

If you have the stomach for it,   Animals is also very well done.