Poem 382

This is about the deep wells of inspiration, drawing on what Phil Mann and David Carnegie taught in my drama class of 1984 about the roots of theatre springing from ritual  and sympathetic magic reflecting the seasonal cycle of life decay death and rebirth, specifically how ancient inhabitants of the Nile delta, dependent on the annual floods for fertility and abundance, would implant a seed in a small clay figure and bury it so that when the water irrigated it shoots would sprout out the head of the figurine, the inspirited god embodying and giving life to the new season …

… over the centuries we kept this concept, seeing those whose job it is to do the dance, sing the songs, make the art that urges on the seasons and cycles of life as being in that moment inhabited by the god, splitting their own skin in order to commune with something higher deeper stronger … there is some sacrifice of self in contacting the numinous just as the dry clay figure must be destroyed by the new life that bursts from within … the migraine suggests a ‘splitting’ headache but is also an altered mental state, a ‘derangement of the senses’ that Rimbaud thought of as central to artistic inspiration …

( I like everything in this poem but particularly the word homunculus and the image riding the stopped kernel of his heart … )

Inspirit

                                             that the wheat grow high
                                                  may the god be split

                                                  let the green tongue
                                                forced from his mouth
                                                   lick round the earth
                                                           sky bowed
                                                        under summer
                                          pitched the length of the river
                                         baking stones spinning insects
                                                            on the air
                                                                night
                                    the god crammed so tight in a man
                                              the sweat bursts on him
                                                          rain fusing
                                                       plain and sky
                                        suspending the earth in water
                                         drowned homunculus drawn
                                                   from the delta silt
                                                              riding
                                      the stopped kernel of his heart
                                           that the wheat grow high

                                                       migrainous
                                                     split through
                                                           I woke
                                                  a breath stirring
                                                       beside me