The poetry of photography

Whovever you are: step out in to the evening
out of your living room, where everything is so known;
your house stands as the last thing before great space:
Whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their fatigue can just barely
free themselves from the worn-out thresholds,
very slowly, lift a single black tree
and place it against the sky, slender and alone.
With this you have made the world. And it is large
and like a word that is still ripening in silence.
And, just as your will grasps their meaning,
they in turn will let go, delicately, of your eyes . . .

I love this simple poem of Rilke ,being "whoever you are" trying to step out of the living room.Like Rilke has told us I keep lifting a single black tree and placing it against the sky .Sometimes I do this with my camera which readily obliges.

It is a , large world ,like a word that is ripening in silence.I know that as the word ripens and then falls off it lets go of my images ,freeing me from the bounds of my own consciousness.

I have just come across a beautiful use of a symbol in nature to recreate a poignant story ,an intensely personal experience that can be comprehended by others only with the help of a narrative.The picture shows a series of blooming firangipani flowers outside a nursing home where the author's father is lying on the deathbed .The narrative is so beautiful that it deserves to be reproduced here :

"It looks charming, and it is. A simple wooden gate, painted white, the typical "picket fence" attracts the eye, but looking around, the scent of the frangipanni flowers also attracts the senses.

This is the gate that leads to my father’s room... beyond this gate, my father lies dying.

It's part of a beautiful Nursing Home in Rockhampton, and I grow to both love, and eventually dread, this gate.

The frangipanni tree offers me large clumps of flowers - their heads bowed in respect. The path is swept on a daily basis, so that any flowers that may fall are fresh and clean, unbruised, unlike my heavy heart.

Will he remember me today? Will he still be there, in his mind, in his body?

I pick a frangipanni and place it behind my right ear, so it shines out happily when he sees me.

They have always been my favourite flower, in their pureness and simplicity, the heady, giddy perfume enclosing me within a safe world of childhood memories, of hanging upside down in a huge old tree, marvelling at the hugeness of the world in my front garden.

Wonderful memories of reading books and eating apples, running around the frangipanni tree kicking up the leaves in autumn...waiting patiently for the first sings of new growth, the dark green tips sprouting from each barren stem, holding the promise of another summer, more glorious flowers, more hanging upside down to compare if my world had expanded during the winter.

This gate, this white, simple gate leads to where my father lies dying.

I took this photo as a precaution to a hazy memory, I wanted to savour every detail about my dad before stress and loss dimmed my memory.

Now I look at it, and although I am smiling with my love of the tree with its daily offerings of fresh perfumed flowers for me to enjoy, I am reminded of a softer, sadder time, where breathing becomes a chore, where time not only stands still, but runs backwards, as we the children become the adults and vise versa.

I push the gate open, and stoop to collect my flower... "



I have made a mental note to take a shot of this beautiful tree with fragrant flowers . This has stirred up my own memories of the trees in the temple compound with such beautiful flowers that I had invariably collected a few wilted flowers lying on the ground and carried them everywhere. We folded the petals and pierced each of the petals with the stem neatly to make a smaller flower .

My poem goes thus:

The firangipani flowers

The firangipani tree bloomed
In my village temple compound
And where it hurt it bled milk
Just like it had done in my childhood.
I smelt God through the peephole
Of a child’s memory enclosed
By the fragrance of the firangipani .

The schizophrenic

My splintered consciousness
Is a medley of broken images
Shards of shattered tough-glass
Pierce through forced attempts at order
Dark and threatening circles
Close in on my eyes, concentrically.
My muscular male arms
Negate my underlying femininity
Sometimes I am male, sometimes female
Sometimes I am me, then somebody else.

I attempt to gather broken glass
For a multi-hued kaleidoscope
The kaleidoscope remains a dream
I only collect bleeding injuries.
My soul lies inert, in a glass jar
In the amniotic fluid of primordial confusion
As research material for neuro-scientists
Cushioned in chaos, there I lay
Afraid the jar would break one day.

The photograph below captures a beautiful image just like a poem does. Some times we create images which are sought for their intrinsic beauty , not because they are a part of the motif of a poem . Single images , which suddenly strike you either while you are pursuing a bigger theme or even while you are going about your daily routine are beautiful in themselves and are used , much later , in a poem or a painting.

My poem on the old man sleeping in the temple goes as under :


Sleep


This creature of the earth
Sleep-talks to himself
Nobody has heard him.
As the temple bells ring
The earth burns slowly
And goes up in swirls of smoke
These lights hurt him
But the smoke does not.
It is just like then
Of comforting mother-softness
Of all-around emerald aqua.
His limbs do not move.
Nor do his eyes see.
At the tunnel’s beginning
It is like what it was
When it all began.
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"At the unlit corner where awareness takes a blind turn " ,the ghosts of the past hurts some times haunt us in all their smokey whiteness.That is when we may start "thinking in flowers" , if I may use the phrase .Just think of flowers in multitudes ,on the trees, in the vases, in the florist's and everywhere else.

A digital photograph you have taken recently of the bunches of flowers in the park can be imagined to produce those images on the screens of your closed eyelids.I give below my poem written in such a moment :


Sunrise and flowers

In my nights of waiting
For sunrise and flowers
I look pain in the face
I struggle to think in flowers
And rising orange suns
My night then fizzles down
With its false props to pride
At five I wake up bleary-eyed
Trying to catch beach suns
Before they turn white.