THE DARKENED TEMPLE

Today was a rough day!

For no particular reason...is it a full moon???

Halfway through the day I thought...OMG I had a commitment to go to a poetry reading in La Jolla. This day and then poetry. I figured I would get all the ooky stuff out of the way at once, as well as "what the hell was I thinking".

The upside was that I got to meet my friend Melinda for dinner (as it turns out her treat for my birthday). She must have had a rough day as well since we both ordered comfort food and eschewed a salad in favor of Mud Pie at "The Spot"...which, oddly enough, hit the spot.

Warwick's was hosting this evening of poetry, on the last day of National Poetry Month. We were to hear Mari L'Esperance read from her book The Darkened Temple.

“Longing itself is nothing but the heart’s open spaces,” writes Mari L’Esperance. And in the open spaces at the heart of these poems is a mother who has disappeared. In a world of war and displacement, illness of the mind and body, imprisonment and violence both historical and personal, the poet leads her readers through a landscape of loss. In unadorned language, she draws readers into the interplay between articulation and silence—and finally offers a vision of redemption.

The words above were written about the book, and it is truly incredible.

We live in a world where epistolary relationships are gone, no letters written, no cards sent, we have even condensed emails to text messages, and have even condensed those messages to acronyms (wtf?). We are raising a generation who think that spell check is always write ;^), and who cannot form sentences, thoughts, words or paragraphs with any meaning.

So in the midst of all of this it was truly wonderful to listen to words pour out of someone to form poems that conveyed astounding visual images.

I am going to share one of the poems in her book with you (if I have offended anyone's copyright laws please forgive me):

Map of the World

These days someone is always to blame
for someone else's misfortune, for the missed
opportunity, the lost childhood. Men
shaming women, women shaming men,

parents shaming their children who go on
to sink like stones to the bottom of the black lake,
never to surface. The men on the subway
droop in their suits like gray pieces of meat.

The women hide from their emptiness
in the gossip magazines. I think about it
sometimes, how humans have lost their way
in the deepening darkness. At the ocean's edge

I think I hear the waves try to tell me something.
They do not. They only do what they know
how to do--to follow the moon's irresistible
pull, to carry the fish in their watery arms.

She is a wonderful poet.

I had a fabulous time.