I Had a Moment of Wanting to Leave the Cycle of Rebirth
Because my surroundings kept spinning as the noes were piling up, I was through with living inside of Keats’ Negative Capability. I could see little flecks of light in front of my eyes and a dark orb
in my lower periphery. I had to watch out for blurriness or double vision, in which quadrant of the eye I sensed muscle spasms. When I studied Hinduism, I made an artists’ book, and I always think there’s more
inside of that devotional text. As many times as I have looked at my creation story, I can only ever remember the first two pages, the AUM. It’s almost as if I should have handled the book
like a mandala, creating it to destroy it, in order to turn the work back into artless granules — to convert the work back into sand. How quickly I learned Sanskrit and then forgot it, thrilled
there was this veil called maya that I had to learn to see through, the moment the small rake erased the circle’s edge — I wept — knowing the monks had spent days making the mandala,
siphoning coloured sand into intricate patterns. And sometimes the work feels like sand, as if trying to walk cross the beach in tennis shoes, the work draws you back into it, you can’t go too quickly,
(the ubiquity of it), one has to go through sand to get to the sea, you can build with it, but the structures aren’t meant to last, and what is sand, but defecated coral once processed in the gut
of a parrot fish, sometimes it’s shells or rocks that the alkaline water has worn away, the sifting foundation of an ecosystem, evidence of a metropolis drawing in what it cannot have.
A Quiet Upheaval
-After ‘Syria by the Sea, 1873’
as if the monument wandered there, a seed of Mesopotamia and bloomed… I can see it in the largest pillar, the whole column fluted like bark, nodes, and grown branches against a long panel of moss on this northern side, its lichen dark as rust and these ruins near the Mediterranean coast. I felt a flurry of hands all over my column frame locking me into place as I watched my body being formed, segment by segment, a play of light and shadow on the ground, worried that those people, who fashioned my existence, might be crushed under my grandeur, what they saw in me this landscape that I tower over, these hills embossed in gold sunlight, how it refracts across my curvature. I had believed such work would take blood -- that I’d never be fully made. While others in my sanctuary toppled rod-like and broke into shards, I was hopeful that my marble may grow soft as callouses or a person’s wilting frame, the way their soft flesh began to hang loosely from their bodies, like no pliancy I’d ever known as I learned to anticipate my own becoming.
Zakia Carpenter-Hall is an American writer, tutor and critic living in the UK. Her poetry reviews and poems have both been published in Poetry Wales, The Poetry Review, Wild Court, Magma and elsewhere. Human Ecologies (2021) is her ecopoetry film commissioned by The Scottish Poetry Library in partnership with Africa in Motion (AiM) Film Festival and Obsidian Foundation. She was the editorial intern for Magma 82 Obsidian, a former Poetry London mentee, Jerwood Bursary Recipient and London Library Emerging Writer. Her poetry pamphlet Into the same Sound Twice is forthcoming in April 2023 with Seren.