Wednesday, July 04, 2012
Hedy Habra Is Featured on ArLiJo
If you are one of the lucky ones with electricity in the DC Metropolitan area and the areas affected by the derecho that wiped out our electricity for nearly 4 days--some folks are still in need of air conditioning--(my heart goes out to you and I hope the technicians get to your areas quickly), why not enjoy your electricity and read a poem by Hedy Habra and click on ArLiJo below and read some of her poems in French and Spanish as well.
Mobilis in Mobili
Watch how some people seem to be taking notes, but if we look closely, their pens race over the page, tracing cuneiform characters, arabesques, spirals intertwined in wildest vines, mysterious glyphs, oftentimes starting with a square or a circle they will randomly fill with parallel lines or curves, until the figure grows into a Rorschach stain in which they discover the extent—or limits—of their talent. And now that words refuse to follow the rows assigned to them, demand a life of their own, I find myself scribbling in concentric circles as if I were an insect lost inside a rosebud whirling like a dervish caught in a jinn’s bottle until a flower emerges from the wraps and folds of his flying gown, his bent head a dark pistil deep inside a convolvulus and does it matter if it is not an arum or a delphinium?
I add more petals opening their wings, then a stem growing into a stalk, but it is closer to a bird standing on one foot, a cormorant, maybe, or a seagull, and with a few more feathers an Aztec headdress begs for a face, but I need not decide if it will wear a jaguar mask or bear a shield, I will fill empty spaces, erase borders, remapping my colonized realm until a boat emerges calling for a prow, a triangle for a mast, its sails ready to swell, billowing with the whim of the winds and a slight twist of the pen, almost floating on the tip of the white foam breaking into droplets over the glistening ship as if stopped in motion, a mobilis in mobili, until I can feel the mist over my face and around me the pull of the waves reaching me inside the captain’s cabin where I am all alone bent over folds of maps, feeling the drift of the current guiding my pen as it slides along the mahogany desk, dragging me down over the wavering wooden floor.
Copyright © 2012 by Hedy Habra. Previously published by Poet Lore, 2005.
Biography: Hedy Habra received her MFA and a PhD in Spanish Literature from Western Michigan University where she currently teaches. Her poetry and fiction in French, Spanish and English appear in many journals including Parting Gifts, California Quarterly, Letras Femeninas, Rockhurst Review, Pirene’s Fountain, The Smoking Poet, Puerto del Sol, The New York Quarterly, Cider Press Review, Nimrod, Cutthroat, and Poet Lore as well as in anthologies such as Inclined to Speak, Come Together: Imagine Peace, Poetic Voices Without Borders 2, and Dinarzad’s Children. Shis is the author of the collection of short stories Flying Carpets (March Street Press) and a scholarly book titled Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa (Iberoamericana/Vervuert). Her book of poetry Tea in Heliopolis is forthcoming from Press 53.
Click on the link below to get to ArLiJo:
ArLiJo
Mobilis in Mobili
Watch how some people seem to be taking notes, but if we look closely, their pens race over the page, tracing cuneiform characters, arabesques, spirals intertwined in wildest vines, mysterious glyphs, oftentimes starting with a square or a circle they will randomly fill with parallel lines or curves, until the figure grows into a Rorschach stain in which they discover the extent—or limits—of their talent. And now that words refuse to follow the rows assigned to them, demand a life of their own, I find myself scribbling in concentric circles as if I were an insect lost inside a rosebud whirling like a dervish caught in a jinn’s bottle until a flower emerges from the wraps and folds of his flying gown, his bent head a dark pistil deep inside a convolvulus and does it matter if it is not an arum or a delphinium?
I add more petals opening their wings, then a stem growing into a stalk, but it is closer to a bird standing on one foot, a cormorant, maybe, or a seagull, and with a few more feathers an Aztec headdress begs for a face, but I need not decide if it will wear a jaguar mask or bear a shield, I will fill empty spaces, erase borders, remapping my colonized realm until a boat emerges calling for a prow, a triangle for a mast, its sails ready to swell, billowing with the whim of the winds and a slight twist of the pen, almost floating on the tip of the white foam breaking into droplets over the glistening ship as if stopped in motion, a mobilis in mobili, until I can feel the mist over my face and around me the pull of the waves reaching me inside the captain’s cabin where I am all alone bent over folds of maps, feeling the drift of the current guiding my pen as it slides along the mahogany desk, dragging me down over the wavering wooden floor.
Copyright © 2012 by Hedy Habra. Previously published by Poet Lore, 2005.
Biography: Hedy Habra received her MFA and a PhD in Spanish Literature from Western Michigan University where she currently teaches. Her poetry and fiction in French, Spanish and English appear in many journals including Parting Gifts, California Quarterly, Letras Femeninas, Rockhurst Review, Pirene’s Fountain, The Smoking Poet, Puerto del Sol, The New York Quarterly, Cider Press Review, Nimrod, Cutthroat, and Poet Lore as well as in anthologies such as Inclined to Speak, Come Together: Imagine Peace, Poetic Voices Without Borders 2, and Dinarzad’s Children. Shis is the author of the collection of short stories Flying Carpets (March Street Press) and a scholarly book titled Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa (Iberoamericana/Vervuert). Her book of poetry Tea in Heliopolis is forthcoming from Press 53.
Click on the link below to get to ArLiJo:
ArLiJo
