poem: mended

 

“When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.” " American writer Barbara Bloom

 

 

 

Today started with a sigh.

  An admission?

     this sky is slate. Blank.

        the ground, tilting-

   rain-washed and windblown

      with the realization

        everything changes. perception.

 

many things are broken. some

        cannot be

    repaired; some others: well

we will shall see those results

       when the sealer sets,

     annealing what was sundered

         in order

       to re-create the whole.   

 

  and we will try using the thing again.

 

one goal attained. the vaster,

    always- a work in progress.

   I hold this bowl, this fragile thing,

 spent some time on its cleaning,

      restoration. underneath-

 it is carved.

   jade. delicate but tough.

translucent.

 

empty. but not the hollow

  kind of empty. more the

    expectant kind- the empty

sacred room in which

    the crib has been placed.

 

and ready or not

   I guess... a decision was made

       for me.

 This vessel will be put on the market

     again. Items always

   were happier

      when in a state of use.

 

maybe there is someone

  who appreciates

      the cracked and imperfect.

   the mended.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author's Note

kintsukuroi: the art of repairing broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer to make the final piece a greater work of art for having been broken.

Reviews

[Fernando Pessoa]

Your confessions are filled with a beautiful complexity and a wondrous simplicity. Are we not all broken in some way? Fears and frustrations that bring sorrow beyond articulation? But you face it for us head one and embrace flaws. You make them seem like precious treasures only one with pure love will truly recognize. I believe you may well be made entirely of gold.

“For every beauty there is an eye somewhere to see it. For every truth there is an ear somewhere to hear it. For every love there is a heart somewhere to receive it.” ~ Ivan Panin

[Marie Anzalone]

Thanks, Paul. One of my favorite novels is Barbara Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible," with a missionary family that escapes from the missionary husband/ father in Africa. One of the characters talks about hunger; she says, "those who have known the true hunger of starvation of the body cannot ever again truly love those who have not." I think that is also true of those of us who have been hurt very deeply in love- damaged by years of abuse and neglect. We need someone who can understand how deeply those things cause our interiors to crack, and how badly they affect us. To be patient and gentle with our healing, willing to draw us out. It takes an extraordinarily strong person to do that, don't you think?

[Fernando Pessoa]

Ah, I know it well. Yes. And there are those truly who have walked through the fire and know the healing of the cool waters at the end... They know patience and passion as few others do. What beautiful reflections you always give to life.

[Marie Anzalone]

"“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?”
-Kahlil Gibran

[Leica]

we are all cracked, broken unless we are unborn..
very honest and moving poem threaded with hope..
no matter the size or depth of a crack, there is always gold to fill it when hope resides within..

post script- love the meaning of kintsukuroi.

[Marie Anzalone]

Thank you, Leica. Your words are much-appreciated and reinforce the message I am tryign to hold onto. Life transitions are always difficult, and require so much. Soemtimes we are not sure if there is enough gold to do the mending. But I think we still try.

[h d e rushin]

beautifully written Ms. Marie.

A vessel is a container (cup, bowl, vase) for holding something. It is also a person into whom some quality
as grace or forgiveness is infused. The first is easily mended, the broken pieces reassembled, but the
latter is sometimes decayed , worn away in strength and soundness, rusted and contaminated in spirit so
that the rotten ends won't fit together any longer. Your voice makes this so very clear throughout/
you're so good at staying on message.

In the end you offer your broken and mended self to someone (something) to be appreciated. And yet
the metaphor can be applied to writing as it can to life and relationships with another soul. Sometimes
you're poems make me groove to your syntactical music.

Other times I jump up and down on the bed.
dana

[Marie Anzalone]

Funny, dana, how similar of an effect your own work has on me? Yes, the vessel is the soul is the writing- you correctly ascertained my meaning here on all levels. As for those souls beyond mending, I can say this- what I particularly like about the two very similar Japanese approaches is that even the broken can still be admired for having been used well and showing the signs of hard use (wabi sabi), or can be annealed with golden lacquer to anneal thiose edges and gaps frayed and torn, stengthening the piece and making it more beautiful for having undergone the restorative process. Even a Man condemned to prison for life can still do that. I read once about Auschwitz survivors sneaking food to relatives in line who were about to be gassed, so loved ones at least had the dignity of a last meal. Women in war-ravaged Africa use their anger over mutilation and abuse and inequality to demand that the world stand up and take notice to what is going on. Not everyone rises to the challenge of maintaining humanity under the harshest possibilities, but a few do. Grace is a choice available for anyone who reaches for it, I think. I have more empathy for the broken in spirit and angry than I do for the well-fed and irritated anyway.

[Ken Simm.]

When the Bride Stripped Bare by her Batchelors, Even, was damaged in transit to an exhibition, Marcel Duchamp finally declared it finished. Whilst that was a bit of showmanship from the Dada, this was about as good as use of metaphor as I've read. The broken item placed back into the market. The fact that is delicate but tough and yet translucent., shows me how autobiographical this piece is.

[Marie Anzalone]

Thank you, Ken. Adding to what you say, there is another side- the Navajo belief that the soul of an artist will be trapped in an item executed to perfection- thus they always left a break in the pattern to permit the spirit to escape. I do the same with my own artwork.

As for that last bit, I am honored that you noticed.

[iliOZ]

i've heard once that we all come from broken families
nobody in my family tried to use gold to repair it and since i never saw this technique, i never used it either
i know this poem is about things, so i am sorry if i turned things inside out

your pointed yet delicate words brought these feelings out of me

[Marie Anzalone]

Thank you, iliOZ. I think that most of families did not know that this was even a possibility. Thankkfully, such skills as resilience CAN be learned throughout life by the willing. And when we ARE willing, the lessons and healing move backwards and forwards through both time and families.

[TL Boehm]

I'm a scratch and dent model myself, so I found this poem resonant. This is a wonderful metaphor for the human condition. if we could somehow filigree our scars with gold - each break, each mark is truly a story. The internal vessel is no different. More room in a broken soul, I think.

[Marie Anzalone]

"I know I ain't nobody's bargain/ but hell a little touch-up and a little paint" -Springsteen

and Cohen was genius when he said, "forget the perfect offering/ there is a crack in everything/ that's how the light gets in."

Simple words, but the concept is vast. I read once that the Jewish believe that hearts must be broken open in order to understand the word of an individual loving god. It is the only thing that breaks hearts open to be receptive to the suffering of others. Mystics of all stations of life beleive it is the only way a soul advances, by being open to being broken and remade.

[Tree]

First, that quote taken from Barbara Bloom was telling; sublime. It really sets the poem up by giving the reader some perspective. And the metaphor continues to slip from the quote into your poem without missing a beat, which makes this reader wonder if the quote is not somehow the catalyst for the poem itself.

I have a deep reverence for the Japanese culture, that honors history and nature. So in many ways the quote you use makes perfect sense to me. And that the poet is applying that same meticulous "mending'' philosophy into her own healing is nothing short of brilliant. If we could all be so careful with the details of our lives as one who cherishes the structure of a ceramic where would we be?

A thoughtful and instructive piece, Marie.

DP

[Marie Anzalone]

Thank you for the review, Diego. You are spot-on in your analysis about the quote being the inspiration for the piece. I read it first a few weeks ago, and it became one of those little thoughtworms that just sits and stays with you. I meditated for some time on the metaphor, on the valujing of the broken in others. On tough choices we make- how we decide how much of ourselves we can give to fixing the broken things in our lives, because not just the shiny and whole deserve our love. Richard Rohr believes that some amount of brokenness is required to move into the second half of life, where we live in houses we spent the first half building. The difference is in our resilience to it. Some believe that having been broken gives them the right to break the beautiful things of others. Others fill in the cracks, hope for the best, and move on. It is very rare to find ones that either celebrate the broken as holy, or who take it this step further and find a way to celebrate them. I'm not there yet. Who is? Perhaps we only know on our deathbeds, my friend, looking back and asking how we rose to each small moral challenge we were handed.

I get caught up sometimes in the lesson. It can be hard to tell the difference between helping another anneal those cracks, allowing in what anneals them for you, or knowing that it is ok to walk away from what only keeps damaging your own vessel. Or knowing that the type of love you give damages another's. I found that actually picturing my soul as a literal bowl recently provided some no small clarity.

[ChemicalMadness]

I loved your description of empty....it was just beautiful

To appreciate the broken....I believe we fall in love with many pieces of a person. The easiest pieces to identify are the physical. The rest reveal themselves over time, shared experience, past lives (take that however you'd like), and the best and worst of these are usually broken pieces. The concept of beauty forged from something broken is not new, nor is the idea that what was once may never come back the same....but you spin both around here with such respectful touch. And the feeling of that tap on the shoulder, it is time. You must.

Well done.
CM.

[Marie Anzalone]

What a deep and fascinating place your mind is, CM. I love what you say about falling in love in pieces, and the past lives? Oh yeah. All meanings apply. I believe a version of that. In the first half of life mindset, we tend to fall in love with that which we believe will complete us, fill in the missing pieces. If we ar elucky enough to reach a second-half-of-life mindset, we look for someone we can be at home with, comfortable in our own skin and mind and heart. The first responds to a perceived lack, the second to the sharing of a whole. I could never imagine loving anyone who was not a poet, could you? And when it is time, the Universe has 1000 ways of letting you know. It sends some... unusual... decisions your way.

[Denham Cole]

a little like wabi sabi

[Marie Anzalone]

Thanks, Denham, that was actually my original title. I thought this took the concept just a tiny bit further?