Poem of the Week: 6.8.23
"Wasps I have eaten thinking they were figs" (Part 3/3)
This week’s poem is the final part of a longer poem. Click here to read Part 1. Click here to read Part 2.
WASPS I HAVE EATEN THINKING THEY WERE FIGS
by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira
Language of simultaneity as emotional memorial. Sideways address. Grass growing rampant each disapproving leaf above. Rocks outlining the public private. By being fuller than a mouth does, because where is when when what once was. Absence as abstraction as presence, next to you, on the bus, wherever you’re heading, through. Stay material and contours. Around us. Hope: alluring, freeing, somehow concrete, grounding, the ground beneath my feet, the ground beneath my feet is vibrating, a form of breathing, living, thus wholly undefined, connected. Spark associations. Seeing through walls. Mine is mine even in the ugliest mirror. Infinity is in. Hills lush in green, and a power plant squeezing out the juice. How missing light can cast wide and lingers without mark. Where the water leads, what gets tangled up in the electric phone lines, and whispers. Room for all—trying, because I am not who I never did know.
Thank you for reading the Poem of the Week!
“Wasps I have eaten thinking they were figs” is, in my mind, incomplete. I’m not sure what is missing, how to complete it, or why I feel it is not yet finished even though it is one of my longest and best received poems. Something about this poem still feels unsaid, or immature, or as if it is still reaching without having grasped.
This poem ends in prose poetry, the liminal sub-genre of creative writing that stands between the logic of prose (sentences) and the imagination of poetry (wordplay). Feeling in-between is a major theme in this poem (and much of my writing & identity) so the blurred form was a fitting conclusion. Part 1 and Part 2 hold fragments of language that are meant to tell a story of growing up through moments and memories of looking within.
In a sense, the poem starts off with the “digestion” of adolescence in the first parts, and ends with a “throwing up” in the final stanza. While Part 3 looks and sorta reads like a word-vomit, it is meant to be a realization that neither the bliss of childhood naïveté nor the agony of adolescent understanding hold the answers to the questions that gnaw at us. Rather, the mess still needs sorting.
If you have your own ramblings to share about poetry or growing up, drop them in the comments below!
Before I sign off, I’ll mention that this newsletter now has a triple-digit number of subscribers (thanks!) and that I need to think about the fall. Grad school is on my horizon, and writing a thoughtful post about poetry each week is time-consuming despite the joy it brings me. So, maybe I’ll write to you for a few more months, or maybe forever, or likely until I forget.
Simultaneously, Ricky