Illuminated Ink

Edited by Susan Bernnan

Al Gore referred to global warming as, “in part a spiritual crisis, a crisis of our own self-definition”. How do we begin to explore this spiritual crisis? Losing one’s core beliefs can toss us onto a dark road. Lucky for us, there are flashlights and candles in the form of poems; making the darkness an opportunity to articulate loss and build new truths. The stunning works of both Aracelis Girmay and Fanny Howe powerfully give voice to a spiritual crisis and questioning that pervades our culture and communities today.

Kingdom Animalia

When I get the call about my brother,
I’m on a stopped train leaving town
& the news packs into me like freight,
though it’s him on the other end
now, saying finefine—
Forfeit my eyes, I want to turn away
from the blood on the floor of his house
& how it got there Monday,
but my one heart falls
like a sad, fat persimmon
dropped by the hand of the Turczyn’s old tree.
& that chainsaw girl, six rows behind me,
with her chainsaw laugh.
I want to go back there & close her mouth with my hands.
I want to sleep. I do not want to sleep. See.
One day, not today, not now, we will be gone
from this earth where we know the gladiolas.
My brother, this noise,
some love [you] I loved
with all my brain, & breath,
will be gone; I’ve been told, today, to consider this
as I ride the long tracks out & dream so good
I see a plant in the window of the house
my brother shares with his love, their shoes. & there
he is, asleep in bed
with this same woman whose long skin
covers all of her bones, in a city called Oakland
& their dreams hang above them
a little like a chandelier
& their teeth flash in the night, oh, body.
Oh, body, be held now by whom you love.
Whole years will be spent, underneath these impossible stars,
when dirt’s the only animal who will sleep with you
& touch you with
its mouth.

Aracelis Girmay

Aracelis Girmay’s collection of poems, Teeth, was published by Curbstone Press in 2007. Her poems have been published in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, & MiPOesias, among other journals. A Cave Canem Fellow, she lives & teaches in New York.

from The Lyrics, section Far and Away, #20

All activity was religious in sixth-and seventh-century Northern India.
Cooking, eating, bathing, sleeping.
Even poetry was a form of yoga with self-realization as its goal.
“The whole of speech is Brahman.”

Can you separate the gold from the ring?
A cloth of variegated color is like a sentence that is composed
of different units and now they are one thing.
The color of fluid in a pea-hen’s egg becomes the array of
color in the peacock’s spread.

What is uttered aloud by a speaker awakens the sleeper who hears.
The two share their understanding and each perceives that
the same sleeper is speaking between them.
This is consciousness: what is asleep and what is shared.
How is it shared? On the air. Sound cannot exist without air.
Sound is an attribute of air.

Words end in silence when the sentences have reached perfect clarity.
Perfect clarity is also called eternity.
Only at the end can you recognize any meaning.

Why does any of this matter?
Because the structures of language and sound offer one
more way to get close to Atman-Brahman-Ma.
They reveal secrets by which you can reach enlightenment and live in the universe without fear.

from The Lyrics, section Forty Days #15

Like a night prayer as black as the Bible
Gold-leaved pages
With no words on them
A new blend of material
Ink white and draining
Layer to layer
And pages because there is paper
And paper because there was prayer
Or night fear. That is, an idea.

You have lines linking stars to stars
In ourselves our cosmos, the illusion
Of nothing between them an error.
Because you are a mirror.

Fanny Howe

Fanny Howe was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1940. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. Her recent collections of poetry include The Lyrics (2007), On the Ground Gone (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), Q (1998), One Crossed Out (1997), O’Clock (1995), and The End (1992). She is also the author of several novels and prose collections.