when the sun sinks low
refugees' shadows conglobulate
over the wired border...
a tender lullaby
softens the wind
"Over a million refugees have
entered Europe, or died trying, in the last few years but, as has been
said before, it is difficult to understand and feel what a million
individuals are experiencing. A picture is worth a thousand
words, and the picture I saw of a refugee dead on the beach let me feel
more directly what is happening in Europe than the knowledge that there
are a million refugees.
The
best tanka, with the compressed intensity and specific imagery that the
form encourages, can paint a twenty-plus word picture that rivals what a
visual artist can evoke. Lavana Kray's tanka let me see the refugees,
both their struggle and uncertainty in the first three lines and, with
the shift in the last two lines, their hope. Whether deliberate or not,
by pointing to the “refugees shadows” and by hearing “a tender lullaby”
but not showing us the refugees themselves, the tanka mirrors the the
refugees situation: they are still at the “wired border” and have not
reached a place where they can show themselves.
Lavana Kray is Romanian but wrote
this powerful poem in English. I had to look up “conglobulate” in the
Oxford English Dictionary. Though rarely used today, it means “to
collect into a rounded or compact mass” and gave me a sense of what it
must be like for the refugees to huddle together at sundown.
When
I asked her about the poem, she wrote, “During the past few years, the
news keeps showing images of the millions of refugees. I have watched
children pushed under or thrown over some fence, and carried from one
place to another, in the hope that things will be better beyond that
fence and they will find a new home. My forefathers were refugees, too,
so I am doubly sensitized to these people. Mixing this reality with my
imagination, I poured all my thoughts and feelings into this tanka.
Anytime
I need an English word, I look for it in a dictionary. Reading the
definitions, I find other words, and I often fall in love with words for
their musicality. Some words cling to me, and I have to use them.
“Conglobulate” is one of those words. It rolled around in my mind until I
found a place for it in this poem."
David Rice
http://www.tankasocietyofamerica.org/ribbons
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