bread and ashes

Just "a few poems" yet again. These are about my struggle between feeling like not enough or too much. Sometimes even both at once. I watch as I walk around in desperation, holding myself out to people in an attempt to give or take love, only to scare them away or to drown them because I am, yet again, too much. Other times I fear that people take willingly what I'm hesitant to give, only to discover in disillusionment that I am, as always, not enough.
I 'know' that it's okay to be either/or. My humanity makes me such. But sometimes to know something and to live it out in freedom are two very different things. Like the difference between a medical class lecture and an operating table.
So I'm learning about my bread and my ashes. They are the metaphors of my insecurity. And also symbols of sustenance and grief, abundance and deprivation. I'm learning how they come from each other, and that I need not fear either, despite their differences.
Bread and ashes. I guess I'm learning to hand out the one in compassion and the other in vulnerability.


bread becoming ashes

i made you an airplane
and taught you to make
the whirring sound
of a propellor
the same way your lips would move
to blow bubbles in bath water

the two of you travelled the
seven seas of the tiled floor
the plane used your skinny arms
for stilts
and slowly absorbed
the form of your fingers
abandoning lumpy wings
for a clenched palm print
a tiny hand fossil

with horror i imagined each
flying machine i'd given away
like a birthday party
balloon man
turning to brilliant mush
the bread becoming ashes
in your choking mouths



ashes becoming bread

a few poems ago
i watched a plane
plummet and fall
and i tumbled over
it had landed like an axe
and chopped clean through

we both burned brightly
our crash a mutual cry for help
till we were nothing
more than a heap of ash
and metal fittings

scooped up and kneaded
like clay full of air
like the back of the dying

set out out to rise
like heat from a wick
like the equatorial sun

baked brown and encrusted
like summer skin
like the thirsty earth

a fresh loaf of ashes
broken for the masses
quick while it's still scented
warm

and there were twelve
baskets left over

"photographs and memories..."

I've put some pictures online from Kolkata, Kathmandu, and Darjeeling.

Here's the link:
http://picasaweb.google.com/hannah.jo.harrod

"... summer walks and bedroom talks, oh how i loved you then..."

my beeeeee-you-tea-full big sister

What happens when two people want to be like each other when they grow up? I guess they just spend their whole lives being unalterably themselves, and adoring each other. Such is the story of my big sister and me. I was recently reading her new blog, and came upon this entry. Hope you don't mind if I share this, sister. It's beautiful. And since I can put whatever I want on my own blog, this is what I want. Perhaps the power I hold over this poor web page is going to my head. Regardless, here are some words from Leah Ray (Harrod) Rupp.

The Vote
Here is a confession: I don't usually vote, and I am very embarrassed about it. I mean to. I want to, and I believe in doing it.The one and only political act in my life has been to march in the peace rally in Portland this year. Even then, I felt a bit ignorant, like a second rate marcher, who was going to be found out, and kicked out, because I wasn't wearing a shirt that says "Bush is the Antichrist". I don't find myself championing for any one political candidate, or party, and I feel horribly uninformed, so I bow out in a very cowardly way.Today in my Gender Communications class we were discussing the history of Women's Suffrage, and how so many women and men fought a long and hard battle, so that I would have the right to vote. I was humbled, and grateful.It means the world to me to have that opportunity. It really does. Almost as much as it means to me that my mother has stuck out a tough few years as a female youth and family minister, within a church tradition where the female part of that is a problem for many.She does it because of God's call on her life. She has a message about Jesus that she wants to share through her work, and so she is willing to take the heat, and carry on.She also does it for her daughters, and granddaughters. So that we might not discount God's call on our lives, or our spiritual experiences as less than valid within our church families.I am so thankful for people who see a bigger picture than just what is acceptable in the culture around them. I shudder to think about where we would we be if no one was willing to question the social norms of their day and age. Let me throw out a word like....slavery, for example.(On a side note...sex slavery and human trafficking have not been eliminated from the world. At all. Not even close).So.....I am going to make a conscious effort about becoming an informed voter. Not just for the presidential elections, but in local things that affect the schools and people who live in my community.


I almost forgot... I'm home from Nepal. Although 'home' is relative right now, it's still delightful. I'll share about Nepal soon.

Jai Jesu.

an aged sort of youthfulness

When I woke up this morning, the house was still asleep. No water was running, no one was utilizing the hallways, or filling the rooms with sound. It was just me, and since houses can be rather out of sorts first thing in the morning, I decided to let it sleep awhile longer. I laid in my bed and made shadow puppets on the wall, much to my own amusement. I made an alligator, and a cat, an emu, and my crowning glory... a llama, complete with a rather oddly shaped tail. At one point a little brown spider crawled across the wall, and was strangely pursued by a bouncing bunny. These times of simple play redeem me, yet so often I choose to forget my call to be a dreamer, because our society really has no place for its idealists. And only its finest artists can make a living as such. The rest of us must suck it up, throw on a suit, and enter the 'real world.' It's times like these when I feel all at once really young and really old. I am just a little thing, with bright red lipstick smeared around my mouth, tromping around in high heels, womens size 8. I'm only playing dress up, pretending to be grown up. My childishness is painfully evident these days. I know so little, it seems. I also feel so old, a bit worn out. Like one who has seen the heaviness of life, and is content now to sit on the porch and watch the dragonflies, waiting for the promise of perfection. I've wandered a lot for someone my age. I've watched African women serve chai to a crowd, bending low from the waist in a humble bow, something like a mountain bowing down to the grasses. I've walked by Cuban soldiers roasting whole pigs by the ocean, getting ready for another government sponsored feast. I've become the playground for twenty of India's children, abandoned, abused, diseased. Each one I pick up like a stone and carry. Partly because it is beautiful, and partly because weight is meant to be borne, so it might as well be me who carries it.

Standing now under a tree, sipping liquid mango and sugar from a juice box, I do the only thing I can. I take the stones and add them onto my wall. My wailing wall, with numerous names and grievances stuck in the cracks for cement. This is an alter to my age. And then I begin to draw all over it, with imaginary sidewalk chalk. Pictures of redemption and peace. Birds and trees and beautiful things. And this is a tribute to my youth.

why i became a kite, part 2

Today is the first day I have loved Kolkata. I adored it briefly, for the way it made me feel. The classic case of "exciting and pretty" like the new red shoes I bought this summer. Then, soon after, I began to watch it suffocate me, as my own desperate needs bubbled to the surface. I couldn't simply kick it away like those shoes when they began pinching, walking barefoot across the grass. There is little grass here, and what there is lies spotted with ants and foil chewing tobacco wrappers. Needless to say, the honeymoon phase doesn't last long in Kolkata. I don't mean that I didn't still see beauty in this place. I admired her from a distance. I saw the richness of her sari. Calcutta cotton is known across the country. Her eyebrows black parenthesis turned horizontal... thin storm clouds surrounding a red bindi sun. This is how I took in Mother India. Until today, when she caught me gawking and surprised me with a smile. In that smile was the laughter and promise of her youth, and wrinkles and sorrow of her age. All this I saw today as the bike rickshaws fled the heat, in hot pursuit of the row of Jacaranda trees. This too, I saw, when I became the teacher and the playground for twenty of her abandoned children. I see it now, in perfect peace as the airplane rises. From here it looks like the crows surround the flying lights like moths around a lightbulb. This lightbulb is the same one that has come on above my head, blinking an idea like in the old cartoons. This idea is love, and it makes itself known to me on my porch. It winds around the garden growing wildly from the cement head of a neighboring building. The one whose hair is styled like a terrace Cubano. It ends up wound around the kite of the little boy across the way. It whispers to the kite as it watches the birds and the plane, turning green with envy. The kite of scavaged plastic and twine belongs to a little boy with no field, only city. As we sit together in this Kolkata night, the kite says, "cut me loose, so we too can return to the ones we belong to, and the roads that know our feet." Not this time... No. I whisper back. Tonight I choose to be like you. And in an act of silent joy, I put down my pen and pick up a rope instead. Tied roughly around my ankle I stand on the mottled banister and jump. For love of Kolkata, I become a kite.

why i became a kite

One of my favorite Kolkata scenes is the varied rooftops of the flats making patterns against the after-sundown sky. The air around you is dark, and it feels like night, but you look up and see that the sky is still holding onto the light. This seems to be "the hour of the kites." Boys on tip toe fly their paper creations from cement playgrounds. Last week was also the kite festival. It happened while we were in Darjeeling and I was dissapointed to miss it, as the familiar kites are such a beautiful past time. Each time I see one I am reminded of my choice to be here. I see in the kites the same paradox I have discovered in Kolkata- being tied down, inescapably grounded, and yet free from the earth, flying inexplicably above all things solid. Bound to the dirt and to an aching heart, and yet finding there can be nothing deeper, nothing that loosens more your binding self. Sometimes I look up at the birds, and I want to rise above the city and fly on home. Kolkata "wears its brokeness on the outside" as I've been told. The worst part of it is that here, I too wear my brokeness on the outside. If you want to stop being a white washed tomb, move to Kolkata. You will face your decay as you meet the desperate. You will realize how desperate for love and affirmation you are when you meet the decay. The poet Joseph Brodsky wrote, "what I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness." When you choose not to escape, not to run away to a place where you can forget, or at least self-medicate through various vices, you begin to see truth in its most basic and eloquent form. Truth without the trappings of striving to be relevant or holding onto the old ways. Truth outside of culture and economics. Truth so beautifully alive in its simplicity, that you remember Jesus, and even though his journey is alot scarier than you've noticed before, it's also a way of peace. I know I'm not the only one starving for peace... peace to set prostituted women on an exodus. Peace to stop children from being the soldiers in someone else's war. Peace to stop husbands from beating wives. Peace to end the genocide in Darfur. I was hoping to rediscover at least a little bit of this, as it's been swallowed up by doubts and questions lately. I wanted to know what it felt like to be free here, but not to escape and fly away. I think I am just staring to understand, in this otherwise insignificant moment. You might say I've had my own kite festival.

"happy birthday, dear Gandhi..."

Tuesday was Gandhi's birthday. It was also my first official Good For My Soul Day, which is short for its complete title, "Good For My Soul, Tummy, Self-Awareness, and Adventurous Spirit Day." When I asked myself, what would be good for your soul today, Hannah Jo? I quickly answered myself, beautiful books. So I made my way to Earthcare books, a social justice bookstore tucked away behind a car lot/restaurant called the Drive Inn. Earthcare has books on sustainable farming and agriculture, feminism and women's issues, religion, trees and birds of India, war and peace, and poetry... just to name a few. I had to laugh at myself, because by the end of my perusing time, I was wandering around with arms weighed down in typical Powells style. This is the point where I stand helpless for twenty minutes, distraught at the knowledge that these books, quickly becoming new friends, can't all be bought on my budget. I say goodbye to them, feeling like I'm abandoning them to the cold while taking the chosen ones home for the night to a soft bed, a bowl of soup, and a warm bath. Maybe I'm being a little dramatic, but every time, I struggle to narrow it down. As if the books won't still be there next time I come to the store and drag them around with me.

I did finally manage to choose. I bought a book called Nature and the Environment, by an intriguing Indian man (whose name slips my memory,) but who turned down the status of highly-honored guru, declaring himself simply a man, wanting to both learn and teach. I also bought a few small, simply bound poetry anthologies. The poems are written by boys and girls who work sweeping the trains and selling bottled water at the station... but who are more than station children. They're learning that they are writers and dreamers, and most importantly, that they have something intrinsically valuable to say. These children are taught poetry by an NGO working here in Kolkata and elsewhere in India.

I then proceeded to be annoyed at Gandhi's birth. Okay, it wasn't so bad as that, but I did for one brief moment find myself angry at this small, bespectacled man in swaddling clothes. How can you get frustrated with Gandhi, you rightfully ask. Well, I made my way to the US embassy to see about a visa extension (a trip which I'd been procrastinating, of course.) Only to be laughed at by the man at the front door, because, as every one knows (including myself) it's a national holiday. When this happens, there is a brief moment when you selfishly wish that Gandhi wouldn't have been born... or at least not on this particular day. Shaking my head at the shallowness of my own thoughts, I quickly realized how ridiculous I was being, and returned to celebrating a beautiful man. It was humbling for me to be in India on this day, in the place that formed him and for which he fought valiantly, armed only with self-sacrifice and love. India was deeply changed because of him, is still in the process of changing. There were no big celebrations, or speeches, or memorial meetings. It was actually a quieter-than-normal day in Kolkata. Many businesses were closed, and people were at home. I found this a fitting way to honor him. I bought myself a coke from a street vendor, and watching the street from a shady spot of sidewalk, I raised my glass bottle, and sang "... happy birthday to you!"