Last Monday I was invited to appear as a guest poet on Eastside FM, where I had the chance to have some of my poetry (read by yours truly) broadcast to a live audience and discuss the themes and ideas that inspired them. It was for an arts program called Radio Sympoiesis.
It was a humbling experience. I’ve always enjoyed writing poetry, but in recent years, I’ve rarely had a place to share them, certainly not to a live audience. In the program I mentioned early in the interview that I had been writing poetry since I was 9 or 10, but after some more reflection, I think my forays into poetry were earlier. I have a distinct memory of being around 6 when I showed a collection of my poems (which I still keep to this day, on the bookshelf in my childhood room at my parents house) to my beloved teacher, Mr Albanese. He took them away and gave them a read, and then we chatted about them in the playground.
Mr Albanese was a legendary primary school substitute teacher who helped our class collectively write a song about caterpillars turning into butterflies:
caterpillar, crunch, crunch, crunch
eating leaves, munch, munch, munch
pretty soon you will be free
flying through the trees
He was a kindred spirit.
So, about 20 years later I find myself on the radio discussing my own work, which has slowly and steadily evolved after many years of playful scribbling and crossing out and rewriting and improvising. I can’t begin to explain how quietly satisfying it is to put something small out into to world, and have other people revel in its beauty with you. Even if it only ever reached a few ears, even if only the mice and the birds and a couple of beloved family members and friends, this whole experience was warming and I am very grateful for it.
Here is a link where you can listen to an abridged version of the show which focuses on my poetry and the conversations inspired from them:
https://soundcloud.com/artemis-projects/sympoiesis-gabby-florek-eastside-radio-897fm
The four poems that were read on this program at the end of this blog post, so if you would like to reread them while or after listening, you can do so.
Thanks to everyone who has listened so far and again, thanks Ira for giving me the opportunity to read these to a live audience.
*
Snails like to ponder in puddles
thoughts lulled by the dull sounds of chewing.
Comments on weather exchanged over breakfast
because company enhances
the delectable foliage.
I keep faith that giant feet
will simply miss them in the grass
but their shells are never broken
they are the home of withered souls.
And when it’s raining softly
I can hear them humming gently.
They dream of turning green
just like a leaf
but they cannot
and so?
They eat the leaf instead.
*
“More people than planets will live in the sea
when fires are shattering houses and dreams”
The people who spoke this believed in the end
and the round about way we would die but befriend
all the dried flowers we pressed on our walls
who would really do nothing but willingly talk
about old times and good times and planets in skies
that lived in the heavens – before heaven died.
*
Somewhere between the rose water
(which you do not drink)
and the dogs’ bottoms
(that we sleep beside)
there is a reason to the tea I sip
(to help me settle)
And the way you like to wander naked through the house.
I took so little from the sky when I asked for rain to heal me
And even the flowers, I fear, could never know the sweetness of you.
I take your head into my dreams
your fingers into my hands
and you let you disappear into me
I look to you
And before your smile passes, I’ve swallowed memory of moonlight.
*
When the dogs cried
we let them love us more than before
and held them closely while we drove.
I couldn’t utter the final ultimatum
“it’s either me or the dogs”
but I felt like it sometimes.
Dogs are hard to be mad at when they lick you though.
And somehow, when I saw you in that light, looking at them solemnly
I knew I’d remember what they gave us
and their fur which lines the bed cover becomes less repulsive
and more forgivable.
Gabriella Florek 