On Writing and Transformation
Ariel Dawn
When
my father was dying I wrote him a thank you poem. Our relationship was
difficult, full of silence and misunderstanding. I was born with a loud voice
that shrank to a whisper as I grew older. When I spoke he couldn’t hear, so
demanded I speak louder, clearer, until I was choked with tears. Writing was
the only way to express myself, and as my poetry exposed my rage and disorder,
he destroyed it. This made me burn to write more, and made me careful,
religious, about the power of words. I edit obsessively, and even the smallest
note is rather serious, intimate, revolutionary. I fight not to be as
oppressive and perfectionistic as my father, yet I admire his writing. Strange
and lyrical, his personal letters often met with silence, for they suggest a
secret life. While I was ill with anorexia and he was in Russia, we wrote to
each other and he heard and accepted my words. It is here we finally met,
between worlds, through a secret correspondence. As for the poem I wrote when
he was dying, I sent it in an email, and days later he replied that he kept
printing it out because each time he’d destroy it with tears. Of course I don’t
believe in death, only transformation. Most of my poems are written with
ghosts, about moments that live on to be reborn into the present and the
future, though I don’t believe in time either. When he died Benny Goodman’s
"Sing Sing Sing” played and I read my poem and he held my hand and kissed
my eternity ring.
Ariel Dawn’s prose poetry recently
appears in G U E S T [a journal of guest editors], Train: a journal of prose poems, dusie: the tuesday poem, talking about strawberries all of the time,
and Coven Editions Grimoire. She
writes with Tarot cards and oracles and lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
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