healing in a spring garden...

"just simply alive,
both of us, I
and the poppy."

by issa [painting and poem, from "in a spring garden" edited by richard lewis, artwork by ezra jack keats]


during my contemporary poetry class at rutgers with the brilliant harriet davidson, i did an in-depth study of a collection by amy gerstler, a fairly fresh but established poet of today...it was mere luck really that i stumbled upon her work-- even harriet hadn't heard of her when i proposed doing my project on her book, an entrancing and haunting collection MEDICINE...i just dug out my paper, a review of the book, and i'll included some quotations from my own writing here to help set up my poem for today, a welcome to may! please, forgive the hyper academic "mumbo-jumbo" [as green gables gilbert would say to anne!] of some of it!

"the concept of 'medicine' is immediately dependent upon two conditions: the possibility of sickness and the concurrent possibility of a return to health. in this sense, these terms, in their bookending, serve to define life as limited by finite mortality. a comprehensive interpretation of amy gerstler's collection thus entitled illuminates an artistic manifestation of highly personalized, yet undeniably universal, interior grappling with these vastest of paradoxical issues of multilevel human experience. in this existential anxiety, gerstler explores through her poetry the ironically simultaneous realities of a vital mortality defined by an inevitable end and the perpetuation of a cyclical natural continuity in their interactive tension with the notion of faith. gerstler's MEDICINE complicates both the definition of disease and the understanding of healing in the possibilities for and limitations of cure. these poems collectively are a meditation on what underlines human lives physically, mentally, and spiritually. further, the material upon which this poetry dwells and that its composition attempts to capture circle around that which makes us at once fallibly human and infinitely immortal. through the cathartic process of poetic transformation, gerstler does not seek to uncover an anesthetic for both physical and psychical pain. rather, she creates a language with which to demonstrate that the reimagination of that pain of loss, of love, and of life, is a type of medicine in itself..." ~g. n., 2006

In Perpetual Spring

by Amy Gerstler

Amy Gerstler
Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
of a sweet gum tree,
in search of medieval
plants whose leaves,
when they drop off
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they
plop into water.


Suddenly the archetypal
human desire for peace
with every other species
wells up in you. The lion
and the lamb cuddling up.
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.


~

as someone who is craving her own garden space, this is achingly appropriate in this fresh spring season...

and here's just a little tid bit i found in my most recent yoga journal issue-- goofy, a bit, but fun...certainly takes this idea of healing in the garden quite literally...enjoy! :)

http://www.yogajournal.com/practice/2752