1
 CONTENTS 
                                                                                                    Page 
1.  Volume of verse: Wandering through Water                        7- 48 
2.   Reflexive essay regarding the volume of verse                    49- 76 
      (to be read after the poetry). 
3.   Bibliography                                                                          77-79 
 
 2
 VOLUME OF VERSE: WANDERING THROUGH WATER  
AND REFLEXIVE ESSAY. 
 
Shelley Ann Rachbuch 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 
Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master 
of Arts 
 
Johannesburg, 2005 
 3
 ABSTRACT 
 
This thesis comprises a volume of verse entitled ?Wandering through water?  and 
a  theoretical reflection on it. The volume contains poems written, edited and 
refined over the two year research period (July 2003 to May 2005). A reflexive 
essay accompanies it, providing a template for an account of the poems? 
composition and a description of poetic devices and practices employed. It also 
engages with the primary concerns of the verse and its possibilities.  
 
The essay reflects on the working method employed: the process and necessity of 
refining a poem by tracing its multiple revisions. Reflexive tools utilized in this 
?mapping?, include the ?Writer?s Reflexive Journal?, suggestions and comments 
made during supervision and workshop processes, as well as engagement with 
other poet?s work.   
 
The reflexive essay also explores that the thematic priorities of the poetry and its 
inspiration which is rooted in a historical, Jewish and South African context. In 
the space of the poetry it is re-narrated, negotiated and struggled with and at 
times experienced without the mediation of conscious thought, to produce 
alternative meaning and the possibility of selfhood. It explores the 
responsibilities of a poet to her community. Further, that the writing of poetry 
contains within it the possibility of extending that which is personal and 
contextualised into a spiritual or universal experience.  
 4
 Declaration 
I declare that this thesis is my own unaided work. It is submitted for the degree of 
Master of Arts in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not 
been submitted before for any other degree or examination in any other 
university. 
 
Shelley Ann Rachbuch 
 
2nd day of June 2005. 
 5
 Dedication 
 
This anthology is dedicated to 
my daughters: Kayla Leah 
and Temima Sarah.  
Mein kindelach, so shein. 
 
 6
  
Acknowledgements 
 
 
I would like to thank Dr Michael Titlestad for his intellectual guidance, 
inspiration and unwavering confidence in my abilities. Dr Ashleigh Harris for her 
wisdom and support, especially with regard to ethical responsibility and writing. 
Nanette Page for her friendship and encouragement to write and begin the 
journey toward authentic selfhood. My Yiddishe Mama and my Dad for their 
love and financial assistance. The members of my creative writing workshops 
held at the University of the Witwatersrand, during 2003 and 2004.    
 
 
 
 
 
  
 7
  
Volume of verse: 
 
Wandering through water 
 
 8
 Sukkah 
 
      1. 
An awning of palm leaves 
hung with strands of straw 
knotted to: rich scented pine cones, 
dewy apples, tiny coloured strings 
of light, dates, figs and brown bottles 
of oil, flour and wine 
 
Rests on scarved walls, thread with silver, 
and crayoned children?s dreams. Inside 
candelabras burn, and the smell of  
roses cut at their heads ? 
lie in tumblers of water. 
We toast, He who took us to the desert 
to roam in poetry. 
 
    2. 
 
The thunder calls out its warning 
and we eat the round raisin loaves, 
dipped in honey. 
As the first droplets of liquid  
crystal, fall on our hair, 
slide down our eyelids, and kiss 
our tongues. 
 
The hostess sighs as the pine cones 
drip and swing, her children?s  
visions are soaked, and the lights  
flicker and hiss. 
 
Following her lead, guests clutch 
wet glasses and slippery 
forks in their palms and  
run in the rain, 
cursing and laughing 
to the house. 
 
I linger under the awning  
holding a tumbler of roses, 
and wet knives. 
Watching the shell like cloud empty  
itself, stretching out its whirring middle, 
and loosening its load  
 9
      3. 
 
 
Lightning, standing on the 
blind roof outside,  
points to the secret dry dunes of 
shells, crushed  
after being roamed  
on for forty years. 
   
And in a soundless moment, 
before the wind and the door ?  
I see the desert has moved,  
since we walked with Him,  
leading in a cloud of glory. 
 
    4. 
 
She spoons onto waiting 
gold embossed plates ? slices of meat  
in a red wine sauce; chicken roasted 
in olive oil, garlic and sweet peppers;   
butternut sweetened with brown sugar  
and cinnamon. 
 
Steam rising, fogs up  
the cottage pane windows, hidden  
beneath cascades of satin curtains, 
and erasing the rain. 
 
The conversation like a jazz jam, 
follows its own internal rhythm. 
The speakers joined, by underlying 
magical soul cohesion : 
that dissipates on the street 
by morning. 
 
 
    5. 
I open a window, to let out some heat 
and see that the rain 
continues to fall softly.  
  
The hostess clears the table and 
serves ? strawberries on meringue    
boats, topped with non dairy cream;  
 10
 chocolate mousse annointed 
with mint leaves ; baklava dripping 
with nuts, cinnamon and syrup ? 
with fresh black Brazilian 
filtered coffee. 
 
   6. 
 
?It?s the roaming, that was It 
in the desert.? I say, between 
mouthfuls of chocolate mousse. 
 
?Roaming?? His mouth dripping 
syrup, nuts and flakes of pastry. 
?No. It was Hashem leading us 
from the thick, stone sphinxes.? 
?Yes. But  
roaming is the searching for Him.? 
 
He eats. 
?We are still roaming,? I argue, 
?amongst our gold embossed plates,  
non dairy cream and Brazilian coffee 
beans.? 
 
?Interesting.? He returns to the 
sweetness, scraping the syrup 
with a little fork. ?Could I have 
some more?? 
 
  7. 
I return to the dripping palm awning 
and look up at the stars. Still there, 
guiding a lone fisher woman on 
her small boat. Casting her nets out,  
then in. Patient in her wandering  
through water.  
 
I take the wet again, knife. And cut 
down the three brown bottles.  
Oil for memory, wine for forgetfulness 
and the flour shaken: a white cloud  
above me, and then kisses on my  
shoulders ? poetry. 
 11
 Stones 
 
My grandfather did not 
have a clock, but 
a slim leather case ? 
filled with precious stones, 
flattened into ovals, dyed and  
carved in numbers. 
 
We?d play with them my 
brother and I ?  
monopoly with stones. 
 
I?d  conjure him  
playing alongside us  
around the green felt 
covered table, holding 
velvet cards in his big hands 
and winning, with whisky  
lolling on his tongue.  
 
My brother and I  
angered sometimes, at 
each other?s ? many  
red plastic hotels, 
green houses, and fancy streets, 
would throw the stones. 
And my grandfather would nod 
and point and say: 
?This is how luck left me 
(striking the table). In a tantrum. 
Staining the felt here, 
leaving bile there.? 
 
Once a year we visit the white,  
greying stones, which cover  
his sand casing now.  
And each visit to this: 
his final earthy place  
is marked out by us,  
with stones veined with  
mud, and engraving time. 
 12
 Blue  
 
At the Coronia hotel in    
Berea, my Bobba moved 
from floor, to floor. In her 
orange and green pant suits, 
and blue rinsed, teased hair. 
A cigarette, forever dangling 
from the edge of  
her red-lipsticked mouth.  
 
She played cards  
one week at Clarice?s,  
another at Sonia?s 
and ?At that Old vuman. 
She?s seventy two, 
(she shakes her head), 
?But nu, what can I do. I don?t  
have choices. Like you mein  
einkelach.? And she?d hold 
my chin, up to hers  
where, I watched her smoke  
unravel  
way past the heavens. 
 
On Mondays she?d rushed off 
to the OK Bazaars  
in Commisioner Street  
for milk,  
boxes of Courtleigh Satin Leaf 
and strawberry flavoured wafers.  
She ate supper in the dining hall, 
visiting us on Sundays for a braai  
 
in her own pale blue Ford, 
with beige interior and  
pin-punched steering wheel cover,  
which she held between  
her gloved hands. 
 
A sad ending when  
that ?Meshugana nurse,  
jumped off the top of the Coronia  
and landed on mein roof .? 
 
A blessing my family said:   
 13
 ?Now she can?t drive around 
at ninety kilometres plus, 
leaving motorists staring after  
one so blue-haired  
and small.? 
 
When she died 
I found an Ouma rusks tin 
full of photo-postcards of women 
in crushed velvet dresses, and wigs.  
Their hands 
carved from kneading, peeling, 
and wringing out 
the future.  
That came to death by gas 
and fire and bullets. 
 
I ask her in my dreams and she 
tells me: ?For you, mein kind. 
For you (she lights another). 
To be, what ve couldn?t.? 
And I wake up and look at my  
hands, veined and feel the sweat  
wet. And wish that I had her ? 
blue Ford to take me there.  
 
 14
 Family Album 
 
The women in my family 
cry a lot ? 
My Bobba at my brother?s 
coming of age, 
could not find her way up  
the stairs, to her seat. 
?Ich bin blint? she said. 
(My mother said, ?Mama, please?). 
 
My auntie Ethel  
at her Cyrildene house,  
would play with the curls in 
my brother?s hair ? 
?Kindelach so shein.? 
And she?d take tissues from  
the pocket of her blue and white 
checked housecoat 
wipe her eyes, 
and offer us cake that was always 
in the oven. 
 
Ethel?s husband tore his white shirt 
and sat on a hard bench for a week. 
?My son is dead? he said.    
He called and said ?Mama, please.  
I love you too.? 
And she?d cover her eyes 
and put the phone down. 
 
My aunt Miriam  
would invite us into her council 
flat in Netanya.  
She always wore black 
and long sleeves, even in Hamsin 
(one day she absently pushed up 
her sleeve, and there was a cattle  
stamp on her arm). 
 
She was a huge woman 
who?d take us to the kitchen table, 
covered in a red-striped cloth.  
She?d bring hot kugel, tsimmes  
and kreplach to the table. 
We?d stare at the steaming dishes  
 15
 sweating. 
My mother would say ?Eat? 
though we had understood. 
 
Miriam?s sister, Esther 
looked like she had self-imposed  
anorexia. My mother said she  
couldn?t keep much down 
since Dachau ?  
her stomach had shrunk. 
 
My mother tells again. 
?Do you know why I am ?? 
(and the hollows under her eyes are 
already filled before she is finished). 
?My aunt ? Pesah, drowned 
in soil when they had no 
gas and bullets left.? 
 
As a child I?d lie in bed. 
What if my mother was never. 
And her aunt was  
wearing her hair down, curled ? 
would I be hers? 
I?d comfort my eyes 
on my ? Love is? duvet. 
 
I came home with the man ? 
my mother played violin on 
the stereo, lay on her back 
the carpet her cushion, 
hand over her eyes. 
?This is the Jewish soul you hear, 
but cannot feel.? 
 
He sat in his old jeans 
and hand knit cable jersey and 
nodded kindly (it?s beautiful?). 
 
She only saw hitler and 
her mother?s parents, and five 
aunts and uncles ? 
who stare out from 
their photographs  
with Yiddish on the back ? 
blinded  
 16
 by the flash. 
(She looks at me, ?how can you 
forget? And I say: 
Mama, please. I love you too). 
I still do and can?t forget  
(the cable jersey). 
I chose the black and white 
photographs and didn?t add 
to the album, 
another girl who wanted to 
wear red stockings 
under her worn, grey dress. 
   
 
 17
 The Wedding Canopy 
 
Framed by the sun, getting 
a last look through the trees 
at what was left of the day, 
the black and cream striped  
prayer shawl 
rose and fell, rose and fell 
to the rhythm  
of the four men clasping   
their fingers around,  
its four fringed corners. 
 
The white-laced, red-rosed bride 
swayed towards it 
held up, by the elbows 
by the man who loved her 
and the woman  
who loved her more. 
 
Ten bearded, black-hatted men sang: 
the sound rising up 
heavenward, leaving behind  
only a trail of tears ?  
down the women?s faces. 
 
The groom climbed a kopje 
to get to the shawl,  
alone 
like David plucking at his harp 
 
and still the shawl  
rose and fell, rose and fell. 
 
I wept at the figures drenched  
in dappled red and gold  
and all at once thought of you, 
and then for a second saw 
the redness of your skin ? 
no voice, no burning bush,  
nor splitting sea. 
Just your skin 
amongst the shaking  
stockinged legs  
and breathless hair. 
 
 18
 The prayer shawl and you ?  
the milk and meat of my life 
which I could not mix 
and loved equally and  
separately 
 
and then the shawl rose up in its 
final fall, 
and the men danced backwards 
clapping and chanting: 
leading husband and wife 
away from it, 
as the last of the stars  
came out in the sky. 
 
 19
 Cinderella 
 
After the candles are 
blown out, and the puppet 
voice man is gone 
away with Cinderella 
and her Prince,  
the little-bowed girls see 
 
the stars are made 
of cardboard, which 
hang on lines of 
streamers 
(washed white)  
and stuck 
to the roof, with  
sticky tape. 
 
They chatter and pull 
at them and  
I think of us, 
under 
the white-washing wire: 
that knots 
where the pegged puppets 
lift and fall? 
whipped windward.  
 
I wonder if Cinderella  
did the washing after she  
kissed him, 
and if she now also sees 
how silly we look 
alone 
in our red-lipsticked mouths 
and glass slippers,  
hanging soiled laundry 
from string ? 
our Princes alive only 
under ribboned  
cardboard skies. 
  
     
 20
 Mikveh 
 
 
Only seven steps to renewal ? 
to the waters caught in a tank, 
dropped from the heavens 
and poured into a bath: forty seah ? 
 
I stand after sunset  
after my twelfth clean day 
in my white bath towel 
before the door, waiting. 
I look at the combful of my hair 
and an earbud wrapped in wax,  
in the bin,  
and massage my feet  
that I have in preparation 
scraped, rubbed and freed 
of my walks  
on His  
muddy thick, earth.  
 
The attendant calls me and 
I stand before her  
and try ?  
to remember the woman  
reciting psalms in the foyer,  
her head bent in supplication 
an aura of white  
around her figure 
praying for another child ? 
 
But I keep slipping,  
and she with her buttoned neck, 
borrowed hair, tight lily stockings, 
and tired womb steadies me 
though I don?t want her to.  
 
I give in.  
She checks my hands ? 
those that have planted roses  
and lilies and sought out weeds; 
then my feet ?  
that have walked with me  
in the circles, thorned; 
my back ?  
 21
 that has lain under 
acacias and cursed the stars. 
I try  
to remember that this is  
one hour in a whole month ? 
but a man  
draped in tallis and tefillin,  
thanking Him  
for not making him a woman  
flutters over my memory. 
 
She holds my towel up 
and asks me to tell her 
when I?m at the bottom ? 
(of myself?) 
of a bath at sunset, forty seah. 
 
My fingers and toes 
spread wide, my hair covered 
by a canopy of water, 
she pronounces me kosher ? 
(like the steak I ate last night?) 
for Adam,  
so we can join to his lost self 
in bright white. 
Bloodless. 
 
 22
 Tell Me 
 
I want to ask him to tell me ? 
 
how his wife  
eats chocolates with truffle centres, 
and smoked cigars in a loft 
long ago, 
with a boy who played  
saxophone  
and how she listened to  
the floorboards creaking  
as she gave her kiss  
away. 
 
How I see my life  
in monotone,  
as I ash  
what?s left 
of my story  
into the air. 
 
How he sometimes forgets: 
to brush his teeth  
and pat the dog 
in his rush to the car,  
dripping coffee  
down  
his shirt front.  
 
How he?s forgotten  
not to want my mouth 
on his. 
 
But I don?t.  
I have waited so ? 
for those cigar smoke rings 
to kiss the air again and  
to know that 
I am made of saliva: 
sticky and wet 
and as bad as he.  
 23
 Tiger 
 
The tiger moves slowly 
stridently, through the suburbs. 
There are houses on either side  
of the tar road, 
and I?m not afraid 
 
in the enclosure of my small car, 
children, calm on the back seat. 
I find the house: 
his car parked  
in the circular driveway. 
 
I get out and he is leaving  
the house, 
smiling at me 
but shaken. 
 
The man there has spoken of 
others and not us, 
and we soulfully kiss. 
He comes out the house, 
and smoke rises  
from a dead chimney. 
 
He waves his finger, and tells  
us ?No?. 
The tiger enters the gate and  
moves past us to rest 
on the woven mat,  
in front of the door. 
 
I tell him I love him, 
and he, like the smoke 
disappears  
leaving me alone with the tiger, 
stretched out on the mat.
 24
 Tzoras 
 
When Tzoras comes to visit: 
I pull up a soft leather couch  
for him, 
try to settle his floating head  
on a feathered cushion and  
place a hot water bottle   
(wrapped in sheepskin) 
where I think his tired 
formless feet are. I give him  
my tales to read  
with a glass of thick red wine 
I keep in my cellar. 
 
I sing to him, all the while: 
hoping he will also hear 
David?s harp. 
We get drunk together ?  
his head remains light as ever 
and mine, bellows with arguments.  
 
I go to sleep to that place :  
where we can talk in tongues 
we both understand. 
 
I try to tell him there, 
that I have learned so ? 
he can go. 
 
But he is hard to corner, 
being a liquid gift. 
He reminds me that I?m 
unfinished,  
and that I?m not so kind:  
the sheep skin  
I put at his feet  
(like a modern day Abraham) 
is parched and separated flesh.  
 
I try to hear his echoing voice  
but it comes to me in overlapping  
waves of undulating sound.  
Still I wave 
and dance barefoot, for him 
to the harp?s fingered strains.   
 25
  
He pours the ruby wine   
over my head and it trickles down 
leaving tails and stains 
on my cheeks: 
the only trace of our meeting. 
 
 26
 At death they come 
 
At death they come with kugel, 
blintzes, herring and kichel ? 
they sit on the hard bench 
with you, and let you weep 
and talk only when  
your dry lips, can break 
open your voice. 
 
At weddings they dance around 
you in circles 
with such fervour, that 
the sprung floor boards jump. 
 
After birth they wipe their 
cheeks from mother?s tears ? 
and caress small limbs, 
tying knots of string 
and Blessings  
to the pram?s hood. 
 
This in the beginning: my covered  
head bows ? 
 
They hold her pale hand  
when she is stuck in bed  
and make her thick chicken soup,  
in the nine days. 
 
They speak loudly of he, 
who takes his Torah and mixes it  
with stars and the lotus flower ? 
and they bow towards 
his mouth. 
 
She wears Mona Lisa?s smile, 
and doesn?t wear sandals ? 
?not modest? she says, 
touching her hair, 
covered with a sock. 
She prays on her knees 
whispering in His ear. 
 
They come to the Birthday party 
and ask if the cake, sweets,  
 27
 balloons and chocolates  
are Parev 
(They?re your friend  
and the Rabbi?s wife). 
 
This in the middle: my covered head 
shakes ?   
(don?t look, remember before) 
 
When a car rolls over a woman 
leaving her limbs cold 
they beg him in David?s psalms,  
staining their books with tears. 
 
The man pins the lotus flower 
to the woman?s naked breast 
(she is on her knees, whispering in 
his ear). 
 
A friend comes home  
with your daughter, 
her curls stretched against  
her scalp into a bun and  
her hemline sweeping the floor. 
At four, she will only eat bread 
and drink water in 
a glass cup ? plastic may break 
His word. 
 
This in the middle end: my covered 
head sinks ? 
 
They share a business and he steals 
my covering, 
and throws it on a lonely sand road. 
There are no trees or butterflies 
left. 
 
You make your husband lunch in 
a box everyday and put 
down the phone when he opens the 
front door ? 
They said, if you do this  
you Will be 
his queen. 
(He?s king, you?re not). 
 28
  
The girl wears clothes to her 
ears, plaits challahs and  
and makes candles after school. 
(The word, the word, the word, 
It?s on the black board.) 
 
You look at her and want her  
to gyrate to music  
and chew bubblegum. 
 
There is no end: I free my 
hair, pulling my fingers through 
the curls. 
 
You go and listen to the ram?s horn 
and you bend your knees, and shake 
and beg, that you won?t have to wipe 
your words off the black board:  
chalk dust in your nose, ears, mouth 
(and start again). 
 
 
 29
 The Jacarandas 
 
She wears her tresses in  
lengths of angular coils, clothed 
in the flowing memory of buds 
and peeling bark. 
 
The wind comes to play with her 
and they dance like lovers. 
Her lavender flowers caught 
in the turbulence   
fall between her toes, 
making a purple blanket 
that squishes 
under a boy?s feet. 
 
He hides beneath her canopy  
holding out his compass and  
wipes his test tube 
against his sodden pants. 
He shivers and whispers to her 
to the rhythm of awakening crickets: 
the secrets of her perfumed flowers. 
?Its all just cause and effect,? he says  
to the rhythm of the green world  
swallowing his words, 
?cause and effect?.  
 
?And the rings, and chimes,? 
she whispers back, her tresses 
wild from love making: 
?The rings and chimes,? she says  
waving to the passing wind, 
?of the uncaught wind and whistles.? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 30
 Bella 
 
She lives in a small house 
in Orange Grove,  
an Italian woman 
who when we first met 
had long black hair  
and still, big brown eyes.  
She calls me ?Bella? 
and shortens the hemlines of my new 
printed, embroidered or laced skirts. 
 
With pins in her teeth, her featherless  
parrot saying ?Hello, pretty boy?, 
and 702 handing out  
needling opinions ? 
she measures and lifts and 
pins, and asks if the length is 
? okay ? 
 
I always nod, even though  
I?m not sure and she leads me back 
to the street, past her garden 
of transcendence: 
Azaleas grow amongst agapanthas, 
mielies, lettuce, trailing sweet peas, 
roses, red peppers and little pink daisies. 
 
If I speak to her long enough, 
she takes me across the broken 
paving to her backyard ? 
there in peeling white pots, 
grow orchids, so. 
I try to tell her how so,  
and she says, in her now 
grey long hair, pinned up absently 
?It?s nothing, Bella. Nothing.? 
 
She won?t hear my protests 
as she picks one for each of 
my little girls, like it isn?t a 
miracle. 
 
She laughs in my dreams 
and tells me:  
?It?s small. All the world.  
 31
 And, it?s not Bella.? 
?But it is,? I tell her, 
?remember your hair down  
your back, and your orchids so, 
in your crumbling backyard.? 
Bella. 
 32
 A garden in a glass  
 
My uncle brought us 
a garden in a glass, 
when we were living in our 
stone floored flat, in Herzelia. 
 
In Hamsin we?d close the shutters  
and sit in the dark, dripping and 
drunk from the heat, 
draped 
on the brown velvet couch,   
looking into the glass 
 
seeing the summers 
by the pool in Sandton: 
picking peaches and plums, 
that pushed at their skins 
with their juice. Together, 
we bobbed in the pool: 
chlorine and juice mixed 
on our tongues. 
 
Our home in a glass ? 
bore those  
fruit from memory  
and fresh pomegranates. 
But, when we strapped it on 
our backs and came home ?  
its fruits wrinkled and rotted. 
 
                                          The glass now stands empty 
                                          in my attic ? 
where it collects dust,  
and a spider 
that grows fat  
in the darkness. 
 
Some nights, she comes  
to me: 
?It would be so  
good  
to have the garden back.? 
 
No. I tell her, 
seeing the couch again 
 33
 and wishing her away. 
She stretches a leg and  
moves closer. 
?It was only a dream,? 
she whispers 
(sounding like an ancient seer 
in a tent, 
holding a glass ball) 
?a hot dream, of summer 
in the desert.? 
She feels my neck,  
moves up and then 
evaporates. 
 
I wake up sweaty and wet, 
my duvet crumpled and  
flung aside, and open the 
window 
watching, waiting: 
for time and the wind  
to break open my uncle?s 
gift of frail glass. 
 34
 My brother and I 
 
My brother and I would 
play at the far end of the 
garden, under the peach 
and apricot trees. 
 
He, the cowboy with 
silver plastic coated guns,  
and I the Indian, dress 
tucked in my panties and  
found feathers in my hair ? 
 
At the click of the trigger 
I?d die a dramatic death, 
hand to heart, on top of 
the compost heap. 
He?d have to beg me 
to Rise, again. 
 
I so loved the rich, thick 
compost, the leaves tickling 
my neck and arms, apple 
peels brown and simmering  
at the edges, filling my eyes. 
 
We?d squash dung beetles 
just to hear the crack  
of their carapaces and 
tear leaves slowly, 
greenest green inside,  
down  
to their stems. 
 
We heard Mother?s voice 
only when we had to, 
the peaches now shadows 
in the dark 
and rush to scrub off 
for supper. 
 
Father?s shouts were nodded 
at, silently gulping, all 
those words that I could 
speak, in the compost heap.  
 35
 Now grown, I preside over 
three course meals: in a  
spotless dining room, 
smoothing my long skirt 
over my knees, and smiling 
prettily at the guest Kings, 
having their say. 
 
And I argue rigorously  
and poignantly,  
my brother clapping for 
me, back at the  
compost heap. 
 
I fear that I shall die there, 
drowning in soil. 
She?s a shadow, 
they will say, passing their 
hands through me. 
 
I?ll give you my sheriff?s  
badge he says, unclipping 
Father?s prefect brooch  
from his shirt. 
You?ve got to. There aren?t 
any Indians left.   
  
 
 36
 And the Fathers saw 
 
And the fathers saw  
that women were made 
with curves of moving light 
 
that could mould men. 
So they covered them 
in the word: 
Modesty. 
 
And the fathers saw 
that, what the women 
couldn?t read 
they might never think.  
So they took away 
Books  
on the order of things, 
and gave them the stories  
and ways of Goodness. 
 
And the mothers saw 
in their piety, 
what the fathers saw 
in their solemnity. 
 
So, they laid themselves 
out on a wooden altar  
and burned, 
showering black ash 
across the ages.  
 
And their daughters born on 
the sacrificial wood, 
sweated too 
beneath their 
heavy garments. Their mouths 
blackened from chewing coal: 
their labour of prostration. 
 
Some thought they saw hope, 
in the smoke  
rising  
and sought forbidden books 
from the libraries 
of quiet imprisonment and  
 37
 shelved illumination.  
Amid their fathers cries,  
as they tore at their beards 
and begged Him  
in their piety 
for forgiveness, 
the daughters  
fed their heavy garments  
to the pyre.  
 
Some remained though 
(in their guilt over  
the shredded beards)  
but others arose,  
held their mothers  
and kissed their foreheads. 
 
And then read  
until the daylight  
matched their curves.  
That twirled and whirled 
and re-annointed, sight. 
  
 
  
 
  
 
  
 38
 Bells 
 
No-one hears them 
but I; brassed on a shop 
shelf, and up, large   
towered ? 
 
All clanging, and wild. 
Silent  
to the rushers by: in 
work hootered cars, 
shelved dreams, and women?s 
voices, gone throatless and 
mild ? 
 
They swing and sing 
and beckon and wait 
for me ? who resists as 
mad, the holes they leave   
in their pathways to late. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 39
 Vanilla House 
  
I sat in his big red car 
my head against the rest, 
and looked up at our vanilla 
house, thick and tall against 
the clouds ? 
 
Closing my eyes, I dragged 
on columns of smoke and  
looked back up  
 
at the black clouds sucking 
at the vanilla  
and licking it,  
with its wet tongues. 
 
And wondered: 
How had I come to the long  
oak lined driveway,  
and how I couldn?t  
follow its length  
to the front door, 
open it and  
go in, turning my back  
from the mystery. 
 
How I couldn?t :  
tell him about it,  
the clouds, 
their hunger,  
and the taste of vanilla. 
 40
 Windows 
 
I dreamed of 
a small room with 
one window which slid open 
to a pattern of red and black  
bricks, grouted with cement. 
 
I told the men with hard hats: 
?No. There is no view.? 
And they tried to move it,  
but didn?t know how. 
 
So, I took them to a building site, 
but there, the windows looked 
at walls and the people 
were blind. 
 
I took a pick and chipped away 
at the bricks, until I saw 
a hole of blue. 
 
And then, exhausted, I lay on my bed. 
And stared out the hole, 
and breathed.  
And the red-skinned man, 
squinting from the light 
of it, promised 
to break out the rest. 
 
I looked at him,  
nodding, 
and saw the checkerboard 
in his plaid shirt, 
and I took him in my arms 
and loved him so  
we became a tornado 
of spiraling, light. 
 
When I awoke, the 
hole had spread and 
the light, now played on: 
the tiled floor, the plastered  
walls, the bedspread, 
and his abandoned shirt. 
 
 41
   
 
Liz  
 
I watched Elizabeth,  
rolling pastry 
and then chopping the nuts, 
her shaven head  
in a pink doek,  
her feet bare  
against the stone floor,   
and her overall stretched  
across her buttoned breasts. 
 
?Madam,? her eyes sought mine,  
?my eyes are paining me.?  
I looked down and promised   
to take her to the eye doctor  
on my day off; 
when school holidays were over ?  
 
But my girls needed  
party dresses: ?Those ones, 
with the bows at the back?, 
and I wanted violet eyes 
like Liz Taylor.  
 
?My eyes are paining me,? 
she said, wiping the tears 
with the back of her palm.  
I saw more droplets pricking 
at the corners and  
sliding slowly down  
thick globules, of jellied pus. 
  
I covered my purple, tinted 
eyes and wished I was Liz: 
giving orders behind her 
dark glasses, 
propped up 
on goose feather cushions,  
in her heated  
satin four-poster bed. 
 
I paid for her glasses, but then 
I saw:  
 42
 all the baklavas  
dripping with syrup 
that she had made, 
were her visions and 
I?d stolen and eaten them 
on our broekie-laced terrace,  
watching the roses grow. 
 
Now, I want to take her glasses ?  
from around her soft ears ? 
and smash them  
under my black, 
bought heels. 
And ask Liz, to dinner. 
 
 
  
 43
 The cot 
 
I saw you in your cot today 
crying, 
abandoned at two months 
in a naartjie box, naked 
but for a red lipstick mark  
on your cheek. 
 
A woman, who just got out of  
her BMW, at twenty five 
in her long blonde hair, 
and her burnished brown skin 
found you, outside 
the shopping centre 
where she bought: 
spicy perfume, bottled peppadews 
for her quiches, magnolia-scented  
bubble bath, Belgian chocolate  
and ribbed condoms. 
 
She put you on the back seat 
of her BMW, together with  
her other parcels 
and drove you at eighty  
kilometres an hour 
to St. Anne?s home on the hill. 
 
There she deposited you into  
the sweating arms of a nurse: 
suggesting that you call  
the child 
?Moodley?. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 44
 Mother 
 
Mother lies between them. 
She sees the light  
from her toes, 
curling up 
and then over her head  
and between their spaces. 
 
She blesses the   
threads of white: 
which stretch  
around and around  
 
weaving  
more blue white,  
around the one  
whose joy  
bounces on the mattress: 
up and over ! 
Moving fast-past  
like little white signs 
pointing to towns: 
tinier and tinier 
(through the mud-splashed 
back window of the car). 
 
Then the lengths of white  
cross over:  
like a freeway 
leaving with the offramps, 
and joining with the onramps 
 
weaving  
more yellow white  
over the one,  
who weeps:  
Moving slowly 
like a drip  
falling  
into a girl?s veins  
(her arms resting 
on a white-steel bed. 
Her mother 
saying Tehillim, and 
stroking her fingers). 
 45
  
She is so pulled and stretched, 
like highway lights,  
running together   
in the distance  
but each 
one 
against the night sky, 
threading her being. 
 46
 Away 
 
I watched the roses turn 
from pink to white, 
threaded beads to make 
a red hot chilli pepper  
on a wire, 
drank  
coffee in Melville, watching  
the fairy lights swing  
in the overhanging trees, 
wandered around the house 
lost 
amongst loved books and  
old photographs. 
And still I couldn?t sleep. 
 
I dared myself to 
enter their room: where their 
beds stood empty, and their  
pillows missed their shape. 
I imagined them back   
and saw 
a leg hanging 
over the mattress?s edge,  
the pink duvet thrown aside, 
their curls squashed against 
the wrinkled sheets. 
I smelled their skin: 
a mixture of milk, spit  
and shampoo. 
 
I got into bed with them, 
and whispered, 
lifting stray curls: 
?Its okay. Mommy?s here.?
 47
 Glass 
 
I wonder, she thought, 
when a glass falls: 
whether it imagines,  
as it?s suspended 
between air and earth, 
how beautiful it was. 
 
If the bearer of champagne, 
hears the crunch: 
of past celebration,  
she now chews, leaving splinters 
in her gums, so they hang like  
another set of chattering teeth. 
 
Whether her tongue, 
once the liquor of love,  
feels itself drained: 
and served  
like a cow?s on a platter, 
dripping with  
mustard sauce.  
 
If her voice, 
believes itself, still fluted 
and crystal in the garden of  
abundant Eden, 
even though it   
sticks in her throat like, 
a blob of unblown glass. 
 
She wonders, when the glass,  
falling out her ring forever, 
now mixing 
her bowels: smells dead 
cow and mustard and apples 
and honey and hot. 
She wanders.  
 
 
 48
 My paper camera 
 
I stand behind  
my paper camera,  
drawing with light: 
men dancing in a circle 
on a square carpet, 
holding a herb from  
the desert and a lemon; 
the surprised dew  
on a spider?s saliva at 
sunrise; 
a dog playing  
with his dig ?  
once a rose bush, 
and little boys  
on a Friday afternoon 
carrying their mother?s wig 
on a polystyrene head, 
side curls flying.  
 
I play like the developer 
with these and others,  
like the birds and men  
and tulips I made  
quietly, 
with the night light 
on my bedroom wall: 
my home made cinema 
when I was small.  
 
Still, I hide under 
the sheets 
from it, 
behind 
the billowing black curtain: 
which watches 
clap, clapping 
against the panes. 
 49
  
                            Reflexive Essay            
 50
 Inspiration: The beginnings of a poem 
 
 
 
The verse contained in the anthology was inspired by a variety of sources: 
emotional states, intellectual or philosophical concerns, images, ?magic?, dreams, 
memory and imagination. They are explored with reference to poems such as 
?Away?, ?Mikveh? and ?Bella?, with reference to other poems in the anthology and 
the works of other poets. 
   
Some of the poems in were affective in inspiration. For example ?Away? was 
inspired by a conscious longing which I sought to express, and is therefore 
largely descriptive of a lived reality. I wrote it to calm an all encompassing and 
therefore immobilising emotional state. It seemed to me that if the emotional and 
behavioural energy was encapsulated in a poem, the lived reality would become 
more reasonable and ?sane?. This transformative nature of ?art? (see below for 
further discussion) is explored by Yeats in his poem ?The Circus Animal?s 
Desertion? in which he describes how poetry may originate from a variety of 
unlikely and surprising sources such as ?the sweepings of the street?, and 
transform them into ?(t)hose masterful images?:  
 
?Those masterful images because complete 
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? 
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, 
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,  
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut  
Who keeps the till...?  
(Yeats 1987:392). 
 
While other poems such as ?Mikveh? were also affective in inspiration, they 
reveal emotion rather than record it. The poem therefore becomes the vehicle 
through which a verbally inexpressible and a densely layered, conflicting 
emotion or intellectual confusion is explored. Robert Frost wrote (in Heaney 
2002:21) ? a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a homesickness, a lovesickness. 
It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.? I find myself at such 
 51
 moments, at my computer with an intense longing to write. I ?play? with phrases 
and words, usually by way of description of the person, place or situation which 
inspires the quagmire of emotion or conflicting thought, until an idea or emotion 
and then a poem begins to develop.  
 
While both ?Mikveh? and ?Bella? began with a description of the subject, their 
inspiration was different. ?Mikveh? was inspired by conflicting emotion and 
thought, ?Bella? began with an image: of the dressmaker, standing in her 
backyard before her orchids which grew with great abundance from ?peeling 
white pots?. Images and moments such as this one, have been the inspiration for 
the poetry. They tend to adhere to my mind in a very visual way and are revisited 
in an attempt to understand their meaning or significance. 
   
Other poems began with a phrase, and sometimes several phrases or stanzas, that 
popped into my head without preparation or explanation. Of this Heaney 
(2002:21) writes : 
  
?The first emergence (of the poem) involves the divining, vatic, oracular 
function; the second the making function ... the best moments are those when 
your mind seems to implode and words and images rush of their own accord into 
the vortex. Which happened to me once when the line ?We have no prairies? 
drifted into my head...?  
 
The first time this occurred to me, I was preparing for bed and ?My uncle brought 
us/ a garden in a glass? arrived as if by some magic (see below for further 
discussion). While the first phrase or phrases of a poem may appear almost 
effortlessly, the remaining stanzas and resolution requires much concentrated 
effort. There are however singular moments of immense joy, when a poem almost 
writes itself in a single sitting as in the poem ?My brother and I?. 
 
While ?My brother and I? was written by some ?magic?, its origin was intellectual 
or philosophical in concern. I had been reading Grewal?s Home and Harem 
(Grewal 1996) for several days and had began thinking about my own past and 
present, how I have modeled and silenced myself by ?masculine? and religious  
conceptions of ?goodness? and ?beauty? and my conception of ?home?. For 
 52
 example the conception of feminine ?goodness? is explored in ?My brother and I?. 
Women and ?good girls? are supposed to, in orthodox, religious and ?masculine? 
terms, remain silent and accepting of their roles: 
 
?Now grown, I preside over 
three course meals: in a  
spotless dining room, 
smoothing my long skirt 
over my knees, and smiling 
prettily at the guest Kings, 
having their say.? 
                             (stanza 8) 
 
The adherence to such ideology leads the speaker in the poem, to a deathly 
psychological place where she feels she is ?a shadow?.      
  
Dream experiences also inspired some of the poetry. For example ?Bells? was 
written when I awoke from a dream which I thought was personally significant. 
While poems such as this are a recordal of a ?lived? experience, their ?realities? 
are altered in the writing of the poem for purposes of coherence, clarity or 
purpose. 
 
Memory has been described by such poets as Heaney, Hopkins, and Wordsworth 
as a rich resource for writing poetry. Wordsworth wrote in ?Lines composed a 
few miles above Tintern Abbey? : 
 
?                             These beauteous forms, 
Through a long absence, have not been to me 
As is a landscape to a blind man?s eye: 
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ?mid the din 
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, 
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, 
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; 
And passing even into my purer mind, 
With tranquil restoration: ? feelings too 
Of unremembered pleasure...? 
                                                      (Wordsworth 1969:31)  
 
 53
 He describes how memory enabled him to revisit ?beauteous? places for comfort 
and joy. In ? I wandered as lonely as a cloud? he further describes how memories 
are a great source (wealth) of inspiration:  
 
?I gazed ? and gazed ? but little thought 
 What wealth the show had brought: 
 
For oft when on my couch I lie 
In vacant or in pensive mood,  
They flash upon that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude; 
And then my heart with pleasure fills...? 
                                                          (Wordsworth :2005) 
 
 Memory has played a similar role in my poetry, for example in my earlier poems 
such as ?Blue? where the speaker remembers time spent with her Bobba and the 
restoration of what Wordsworth describes as ?unremembered pleasure?: 
 
?And she?d hold 
my chin, up to hers  
where, I watched her smoke  
unravel  
way past the heavens.? 
 
This is also evident in later poems such as: ?My brother and I?, where the speaker 
revisits childhood joys of dressing up as ?the Indian, dress/ tucked in my panties, 
and/ found feathers in (her) hair?. Memory has been the inspiration for verse and 
been utilised as a method for re-narrating the past. Perhaps as Edna O?Brien 
stated, in an interview with Phillip Roth (Roth 2002:103), with regard to the 
sharpness of her memory that: ?It?s the price of being a writer. One is dogged by 
the past-pain, sensations, rejections, all of it. I do believe that this clinging to the 
past is a zealous, albeit hopeless, desire to reinvent it so that one could change 
it.? 
 
I have found that the  poetic space is a place where the struggles of thought, 
emotion and circumstance may be expressed, with little interference. Stampfer 
(1971: xiii) writes in this regard ?poems are not simply art objects, but successive 
grapplings with the concerns of the poet?s imagination.? Looking back on the 
poems I have written over the past two years, I can trace my ?successive 
 54
 grapplings?, not only with what Stampfer describes as ?the poet?s imagination?, 
but engagement with my lived ?realities? (for example the childhood memories in 
?Family Album?). I have found that in the writing of poetry, my memory 
magically as Raban (in Korte 2000:11) puts it: ?feeds the irrelevancies to the 
shredder, enlarges on crucial details, makes links and patterns, finds symbols, 
constructs plots.? (This is explored further in the account of my ?working 
method?). 
 
My verse has also served as a mechanism for recording the past and offering 
some form of resolution, or exploring the way in which it resists resolution. For 
example I was inspired to write ?Family Album? to deal with the memory of the 
man who ?sat in his old jeans/and hand knit cable jersey and/nodded kindly (it?s 
beautiful?)?. The poetry therefore enabled examination of personal history and 
spirituality and  became a psycho-spiritual endeavour. 
 
Working Method: The making of a poem 
 
It is difficult to describe my working method once a poem has begun, since I 
have not developed or followed a singular procedure. Each poem has a unique 
development, which is dependent on the strength or weakness of its initial 
?outpouring?. I will however trace the development of ?Cinderella?, ?Family 
Album? and ?Mikveh? with reference to other poems in the anthology and those of 
other poets who have influenced my poetic style, since together they map the 
elements of my working method. 
    
Once the idea or beginning of a poem has come to me, it is written with a 
complete lack of control: as a kind of outpouring. It usually has no ending or 
resolution (save for the singular moments aforementioned) or it is personally 
unsatisfactory. Before I revise or consider the ?outpouring? to be a poem, I find it 
essential to discover its ending by way of an obsessive reading and re-reading of 
it: I develop a compulsive relationship with the ?poem?, so that it becomes my 
companion for days and even months. For example I read and re-read ?And the 
fathers saw? until I was able to recite it without reference to the written text. 
 55
 While engaged in my daily routines I recited it (in my head) in the hope that its 
resolution would arrive, which in this case it did.  
 
If this ?method? is unsuccessful, its resolution may be found within the language 
or imagery of the ?poem? as was the case with ?Cinderella? (originally named 
?Stars in her eyes?). 
?Stars in her eyes? 
 
After the candles are 
out blown, the puppet 
voice man gone; bows and 
wrapping on the floor, 
spent - 
I see the stars are 
of cardboard made, 
hanging on lines of 
streamers washed 
white, stuck to the roof so - 
sticky taped. 
 
Little bowed girls, around  
them chatter and pull, 
and their colour crayons 
press - leaving  
bits steamed hard, 
then run off sliding  
 
To white washing wire, 
knotting 
where the pegged puppets: 
lift and fall, 
whipped windward - 
 
I close my eyes, a conjurer, 
blowing the party candles 
back, to see before the after, 
that I ; a failed  
washer woman am - 
girlish in a red dress and heels, 
crayons out held, pulling  
at a string and chattering. 
 
 
Its resolution was incoherent and dissonant (as was the majority of the ?poem?). 
However I enjoyed its imagery: that of the puppet, of its speaker: ?girlish in a red 
 56
 dress and heels,? who hangs washing on the line and the stars ?made/of 
cardboard?. To simplify the ?poem?s? dense and complex imagery, I returned to 
the ?poem?s? inspiration: a dream in which I looked up at the stars at a children?s 
party and discovered that they were made of cardboard. In the following draft 
(see below), I re-wrote the first two stanzas, using the inspirational image as my 
guide: 
 
?The stars are made 
of cardboard. They  
hang from lines of 
ribbon. Stuck to the 
sky with sticky tape. 
 
Little girls, in their party 
dresses stand beneath. And  
when it?s over, pull at them. 
And chatter about the puppet 
voice man. Who made  
Snow White and her Prince,  
come alive.?     
 
I had learned, through workshop feedback and comments made during 
supervision, that coherence is often achieved through simplicity and a ?logical? 
progression of experience. I introduced the fairy tale character ?Snow White?, to 
convey a practicality: the ?puppet/voice man? was a puppeteer who had 
performed the fairy tale, ?Snow White?. This approach led me to unify the image 
of the puppetry, its fantastical qualities, and that of the cardboard stars: ?stuck to 
the/ sky with sticky tape?. The chance introduction of the fairy tale character gave 
the ?poem? a thematic coherence, I had sought and which it had lacked. The 
speaker ?girlish in a red dress and heels?, of the final stanza of the initial draft 
(who had stood out inexplicably), became in my mind linked to ?Snow White? 
(Cinderella in the later draft). I re-wrote the final stanzas: 
 
?And wonder if Snow white 
did the washing, after 
she kissed him. And if  
she also, now sees the 
cardboard stars. How silly 
we look in our red-lipsticked 
mouths. And wishes the ribbons  
would fly away, making the  
 57
 stars shoot. And jiggle 
the lines. 
 
We are silly, in our red lipstick  
and heels, hanging washing on 
the line. 
Without our princes who 
live only under ribboned skies.? 
     
The image of ?our red lipstick/and heels?, and that of the prince together 
(although four months later) led me to choose ?Cinderella? as the fairy tale 
character. I spent months then attempting to coherently distill the subject and 
themes of ?Cinderella?. I had read a lot of Heaney?s poetry and greatly admired 
his poem ?Harvest Bow? (Heaney 1990:128), because of his ability to contain all 
his thought and emotion in the description and body of one single object. I was 
also taken with Hopkins? fascination with the intrinsic quality of objects to 
capture ?the outward reflection of the inner nature of the thing? (Gardner 
1987:xx-xxii).  
I wrote in my reflexive journal regarding ?Family Album?: 
 
?I think that perhaps, part of what worked in ? The women in my family cry? 
(renamed ?Family Album?) was that I was able to distill each ?character? to a kind 
of essence (at least in how I viewed them). Although there was no single object 
or subject as in Heaney?s Harvest Bow, I felt (after a lot of work and obsession) 
that I could encapsulate my experience of the ?characters? in a single stanza.? 
 
In order to achieve this in ?Cinderella? I attempted to distill the metaphor of 
Cinderella and extend it throughout the body of the poem, by aligning the speaker 
?girlish in a red dress and heels? (of the earlier draft) and the character Cinderella 
(of the later draft). I extended the image further by establishing a relationship 
between the puppeteer and Cinderella. In doing so: the character Cinderella, the 
speaker and the puppeteer all became part of a metaphorical unity which 
encapsulated my densely layered emotional and intellectual subject and paved the 
way to layered levels of meaning.  
     
I found that such employment of more simple and economic language also 
contributes towards ?layers? of meaning. I had learned during workshop feedback 
and supervision that language and words have a virtually limitless complexity, 
 58
 and the capacity for producing statements characterised by multiplicity, duplicity, 
and ambiguity (Marcus In Berman 1993:63). For example in the second draft of 
the second stanza of ?Bella?  I wrote: 
?With pins in her teeth, her featherless  
parrot saying ? Hello, pretty boy?, 
and seven o? two handing out opinions  
like free condoms - 
she measured and lifted, and 
pinned, and asked if the length was 
- okay ?? 
  
Dr. Titlestad pointed out that the image of the ?free condoms? was dissonant to 
the context in which it occurred. Consequently I rejected the image of the ?free 
condoms? and wrote ?702 handing out needling opinions.? ?Needling? was 
selected because it was consistent with the other imagery of the poem and 
restricted potential ambiguities of meaning. It was also selected because it was 
consistent with the imagery of: ?measured?, ?pinned? and ?shortened?. 
   
I adopted a similar approach in ?Cinderella?. I looked at both the aforementioned 
drafts and sought to combine them, by firstly rejecting those images which were 
inconsistent and ambiguous with those of the others in the ?poem?. For example I 
rejected the image of the crayons (of the first draft), because although they may 
belong to the world of childhood and fairy tale in their potential imaginative 
sense, they merely served as a distraction rather than a method for furthering 
coherence and unity. I therefore also rejected the following: ?their colour 
crayons/ press - leaving/ bits steamed hard/ then run off sliding?. Although the 
words ?press? and ?steamed? were consistent with the ?washing? imagery, I felt 
that they perhaps were ?overloaded? with meaning: I had been trying too hard to 
make the crayon imagery consistent with that of the washing imagery, and to 
make a connection between them. 
 
In order to enable the reader to understand the movement from the ?party? to the 
?washing line? both logically and figuratively, I introduced what the ?little-bowed 
girls? first saw and then what they did: ?chatter(ed) and pull(ed)? at ?lines 
of/streamers?. The description of the streamers as ?(washed white)?, was 
 59
 specifically bracketed to emphasize their relationship to ?us/ under / the white 
washing wire?. Further, their chattering and pulling at the ?stars? hanging on lines 
of streamers, leads the speaker to thoughts of ?us?: ?under/the white-washing 
wire?.   
 
I recognised that the description of ?the little-bowed? pulling at and chattering 
beneath the cardboard stars,  related to the final stanza of the initial draft:  
 
?that I ; a failed  
washer woman am - 
girlish in a red dress and heels, 
crayons out held, pulling  
at a string and chattering.? 
 
Even though these lines were later rejected for reasons of clarity, they became 
enmeshed in my mind with the ?silliness? (of the earlier drafts) and the tragedy of 
belief in romantic notions of love and marriage. In the final stanza I introduced 
the lines: ?I wonder if Cinderella/ did the washing after she/ kissed him? to align 
the fairy tale with ?us?. Further I aligned childhood and its entertainment with the 
lived reality of adulthood, by the description of us as ?silly? (in its ironic sense) in 
?our red-lipsticked mouths?. The ?glass slippers? were introduced in the final draft 
as they further thematically connected the fairy tale ?Cinderella?, with the 
speaker?s ?reality? in adulthood and the fragility of such an experience. In these 
ways the fairy tale was re-invented as a tragedy. 
 
Through experimentation and guidance received during supervision and 
workshop feedback, when I edit and re-edit my poetry I seek words that best 
describe the experience, and those that in their seeming simplicity best convey 
inter-related and complex emotional and intellectual states. I recognised this 
initially, during the feedback I received in a workshop session, on ?The cot? (the 
first poem I wrote for the course ?Lessons in Storytelling?).  
 
?A woman, who just got out of  
her BMW, at twenty five 
in her long blonde hair,? 
                                    (stanza 2) 
 60
  
It was pointed out that the ?simple? choice of preposition conveyed the writer?s 
experience of the woman and the thematic concerns of the poem (?Cot? was 
included despite its difference to most of the poetry in this anthology: it is 
polemical in nature, but was included because it reflects my ?development? as a 
?poet?). 
 
An enormous amount of time is spent choosing the ?most? suitable word for a line 
in a poem. Thackery (in Sewall 1963:59-60) writes of Dickinson: ?Her constant 
practice of compiling a thesaurus of word choices for a single line, while 
constituting grave editorial difficulty, is at least an indication that each word was 
a veritable dynamo of implications and associations.? This can be seen for 
example when I edited ?And the fathers saw?. I changed the word ?re-anointed 
(sight)?, several times. It had been ?changed? ,?re-sculptured?, ?remade?, ?re-
 invented? and ?re-figured?. ?(R)e-anointed? was finally chosen, because it related 
to the religious and historical themes of the poem and described the complete 
transformation in a biblical fashion.   
 
Although I did not spend an inordinate amount of time choosing any particular 
word when I edited ?Cinderella?, I did consider that describing the washing ?line? 
and the ?lines? from which the cardboard stars hung, in the same way would be 
repetitious and too ?obvious?. I therefore chose to describe the washing line in an 
unconventional manner as ?washing wire?, intentionally drawing the reader?s 
attention to its description and aligning its thematic connection to the cardboard 
stars. This effect was furthered by the reference to the ?soiled laundry? hanging 
on ?string?. String was specifically chosen to unify the images: ?us? hanging the 
washing, the puppet show and Cinderella (and her Prince). 
 
I have employed metaphor in the poetic space, as a method for untangling the 
mystery of perceived or lived experience. Its use has been employed as Berlin (in 
Spence 1993:103) puts it:  
 
 61
 ?as neither mere embellishment, nor an addition to, nor distortion of reality, but 
the natural inevitably transient and only possible way of perceiving, interpreting, 
explaining that is open to a person of that particular time and place, at that 
particular stage of their culture.? 
 
 
I am not convinced though that the metaphors employed in my poetry, are the 
only possible way to imaginatively interpret the mysteries and illusions of my 
lived experience. Although the metaphors employed are largely reflective of 
personal identity (see for example ?Bells? and ?Mikveh?) they are also 
representative of collective identity (see  ?Cinderella? and ?Family Album?).  
 
Although writers are a product of social, psychological and cultural histories their 
works (and so too the metaphors employed) need to have an independent 
existence. Heaney (2003: 344) admires Elizabeth Bishop?s ability to write poetry 
that ?can be read without any special knowledge of Bishop?s life.? Writers 
arguably prefer their works to exist independently of themselves. I wrote in my 
journal regarding Barthes? ?Death of the Author? (1977: 142-8) in 2002: 
 
?I have come to understand that although writers like everyone else in the world, 
are a product of their social, psychological and cultural histories they need to 
give enough to a reader in a work so that, they will not have to be consulted to 
interpret it.? 
 
It is hoped that my verse should not require extensive research and consultation 
for the unraveling of its meaning. As Barthes wrote: ?the space of writing is to be 
ranged over, not pierced..? Its ?meaning? should not fixed, for to do so would be 
to ?impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the 
writing.? (1977: 142-8). 
 
Punctuation has been employed as a methodology to signify meaning in the 
poetry. My supervisor rightly pointed out that the punctuation in my poetry 
required attention. I tended to use a particular symbol, where it ?felt right? as 
opposed to where it served as an enhancement of meaning or clarification of the 
poetry. I learned that as Truss (2003:20) puts it ? Punctuation herds words 
together, keeps others apart. Punctuation directs you how to read, in the way that 
 62
 musical notation directs a musician how to play.? The following is the final 
stanza of an earlier draft of ?Bella?: 
 
?She laughs in my dreams 
and tells me, It?s  
small. All the world. And it?s 
- not Bella. 
But it is - I tell her - 
remember your hair down your 
back and your orchids so 
in your crumbling backyard : 
Bella.? 
 
 
The lines: ?She laughs in my dreams/ and tells me, It?s/ small.?, are problematical 
for several reasons. The lack of inverted commas, immediately preceding ?It?s/ 
small?, fails to indicate to the reader that there, begins a dialogue between the 
speaker of the poem and the dressmaker. Their insertion both clarifies and 
advances understanding of the poetry. The comma between ?tells me? and ?It?s?, 
although resulting in a pause fails to achieve what the colon does. The final 
draft?s use of the colon (?and tells me:/ It?s small.?), theatrically announces what 
is to come: the unexpected dialogue. Truss describes such use of the colon as a 
well trained magician?s assistant, which pauses slightly to create expectation and 
reveals the trick. 
      
The lines: ?And it?s/ -not Bella?, presented several problems. The employment of 
the hyphen was inappropriate. In fact I had wanted to use the dash (incorrectly 
though), to indicate dialogue and emphasize that the world was according to the 
dressmaker ?not Bella?. I found that by placing the phrase ?And, it?s not Bella? on 
a separate line entirely, the desired effect was achieved and the opening inverted 
commas did away with the necessity of the dash to indicate dialogue. 
  
In other of my poems I utilised the hyphen instead of the end dash. For example 
in ?Family Album?, I wrote: ?The women in my family/ cry a lot -?. My supervisor 
pointed out that the hyphen should be replaced with a dash, and that I had been 
confusing them as they in fact serve different functions. The dash connects (or 
separates) phrases and sentences, while the hyphen is used to connect (or 
 63
 separate) individual words (Truss 2003:158). The aforementioned lines required 
the dash, which created the dramatic disjunction I wished to employ for purposes 
of pathos. In ?Liz? (?four-poster bed? and ?our broekie-laced terrace?) and 
?Cinderella? (?little-bowed girls?, ?white-washing wire?, and ?red-lipsticked 
mouths?) I came to admire the coherence a hyphen correctly employed could 
create. It also has in a sense enabled me to create a language of my ?own?. 
 
I discovered that choice of punctuation could either create intentional ?ugliness? 
or typographical pleasure. For example in ?Liz?, the line ?from around her soft 
ears?, was specifically separated from its preceding and following line by the use 
of the dashes. Typographically they are far less soothing than commas, and since 
the speaker?s confession is an ugly one, the dash was chosen for this purpose. In 
the later draft of ?Bella?, the commas were chosen for the line: ?But it is,? I tell 
her,? for their fluidity and in keeping with the poem?s concern with beauty and 
transcendence.  
 
Regarding the use of descriptive words, I wrote in my writer?s reflexive journal 
at the end of 2003:  
 
?I need to learn not to use so many adverbs and adjectives in my writing. I should 
try to convey the feeling or thought by a description of the subject or 
circumstance. In writing often, less is more: I must give readers space to develop 
personal assessments or interpretations and so draw them into the story or poem.? 
 
The initial draft of ?Stones? required extensive editing since it overstated the 
description of the stones (they were described both in stanza 1 and stanza 2 
below). In order to rectify this I discarded the description of the stones (in bold) 
of the second stanza. 
 
?My grandfather did not 
have a clock, but 
a slim leather case ? 
filled with precious stones, 
flattened into ovals, dyed and  
carved in numbers. 
 
 64
 ?We?d play with them my 
brother and I - monopoly 
with stones. Their coolness 
against my cheek, their 
taste on my tongue: almond  
cigar smoke.? 
                                                                      
 
Contemporaneously however, being overly subtle may also distance the reader. 
For example one of the initial drafts of ?Stones? (stanza 3) was so discreet that it 
was incomprehensible: 
 
?He around the green felt 
four legs 
Won!  
Then all gone.? 
 
                    (Stones stanza 3) 
 
To remedy it I re-wrote the stanza providing more detail: how the grandfather 
came to sit at the table (not simply ?around the green felt?), and that he was a 
gambler. (The line ?Then all gone? was explored in the final stanzas, of the final 
draft).   
 
?I?d  conjure him, playing  
alongside us, around a green felt 
covered table, holding 
velvet cards in his big hands, 
and winning, with whisky lolling   
on his tongue.?  
 
                                                                (stanza 3 ?Stones?) 
  
During the editing process certain phrases are rejected not only for their 
inconsistency,  ambiguity, or complexity. They may be replaced by that which is 
visually communicative. For example in ?Cinderella? the phrase ?Without our 
princes? was rejected, and ?alone?  was chosen in its stead. ?(A)lone? was  
purposefully placed on a line of its own, to communicate its meaning in both a 
descriptive and visual way: it is the only word in the poem which stands on its 
own.   
 65
  
An entire poem may be rejected in the editing process, as was the case with a 
poem which was excluded from this anthology (it remains untitled). I felt that it 
was simply word play. Heaney refers to such poems as ?verbal athletic display?: 
those poems which do not engage with the self. I was inspired to write the poem, 
after I visited an elderly woman who was dying. Ambitiously, I wanted to 
explore approaching death and how it may be entirely different from a lived life. 
I read and re-wrote it a number of times over approximately one year, altered and 
re-figured the imagery, the speaker, the language and its composition, so that it 
emerged entirely ?new? when compared to its initial ?outpouring? (perhaps this is 
the reason Dickinson so eloquently wrote: ?It is finished, can never be said of 
us.?( in Sewall 1963:59)). Yet it remained a poem that failed to ?explode in 
silence/ without forcing, without violence?, one that?s music was not ?strong and 
clear and good...? It was rejected because nothing happened inside me: no 
epiphany, nor experience (Heaney 2002:19).  
  
Sometimes the mere choice of word leads to an unexpected revelation and an 
exploration of another level of meaning. For example in the search for a word to 
describe the garden in ?Bella?, transcendence was chosen . This choice of word 
led to an exploration of the garden?s existence as a spiritual experience, and the 
abstract ideas of miracle, transcendence and beauty. The language of poetry was 
then, the creative force which had the ability to penetrate that which was known 
and connect to that which was unknown. As Heaney puts it, ?words themselves 
are doors.? (Heaney 1980:52) 
 
I learned by way of experimentation to represent what I saw in the physical world 
and simultaneously express its spiritual elements. I discovered that I was able to 
do so by initially placing the subject of the poem firmly in a physical reality. In 
?Bella?, I placed the dressmaker firmly in her home in ?Orange Grove?. Once I 
had done so, I was able with the progression of each stanza, to move her into a 
more spiritual and ultimately dream-like realm (see the third stanza as compared 
to the first two stanzas of the poem).  
 
 66
 The sixth stanza of ?Bella?, places the subject of the poem in the aforementioned 
spiritual realm. I was enabled to do so at this stage of the poem through the 
aforementioned reference to: ?transcendence? (stanza three), orchids as ?so? 
(stanza four), and ?miracle? (stanza five). Although these stanzas remain within 
the ?physical? realm, these references provided and ?set up? the transition to the 
dream realm. As an early poem, I found it essential to state: ?She laughs in my 
dreams?. In some of my later poems I found the confidence through trial and 
error, to make such transitions without the necessity of such statements. 
  
In ?Vanilla house?, although the movement to the ?dream? experience was not 
specifically stated, it was clearly marked out for the reader: the subject ?looked 
back up? (stanza two),  into the realm where: 
 
at the black clouds sucking 
at the vanilla,  
and licking it,  
with its wet tongues. 
                                                                (stanza three).  
 
In later poems such as ?Windows? I felt able to make transitions without  
?guiding? statements, such as ?looked back up?. I came to realise that the poetic 
space contained within it the possibility, of a place where my subjects were not 
required to follow ?earthly? confinement of time, space and logic.  
 
I discovered through the reading of other poets and by way of experimentation, to 
employ different devices to represent the world in a fashion best suited to my 
experience of it. For example in ?Sukkah? I chose to use ?sensual? language. I 
read and admire the sensual nature of Keats? poetry for his ability to engage all 
the senses in the description of his subjects, consequentially enabling the reader 
to become immersed in his poems and experience them on a ?personal? level. His 
influence is perhaps most evident in ?Sukkah? where I attempted to create clear 
visions in the reader?s mind, by engaging the senses: sight: ?Rests on scarved 
walls thread with silver?; sound: ?The thunder calls out its warning?; smell: ?rich 
scented pine cones?; taste: ?chicken roasted in olive oil,/ garlic and sweet 
 67
 peppers?; and touch: ?as the first droplets of liquid/ crystal, fall on our hair,/slide 
down our eyelids, and kiss/ our tongues?. Although these descriptions do not 
approximate Keats? genius, the reading of his work has been exceptionally 
valuable and instructive. 
 
In the ?Bella? poem on the other hand, I attempted to employ the power of 
silence. I felt that there were no words to describe the magic and beauty of the 
orchids. I wrote: 
 
?there in peeling white pots, 
grew orchids, so, 
I tried to tell her how so,...?  
 
 
I did not attempt to express the beauty of the orchids because I felt that language 
(ironically) was unable to communicate it. I felt that my reader could experience 
just how beautiful they were without and as a result of my failure to describe 
them. Dickinson similarly saw that ?the most awe inspiring and significant things 
experienced in the external world are wrapped in silence and mystery?. She was 
also concerned with the reason, words which ordinarily seemed capable of 
expressing emotion and thought, sometimes becomes inadequate. She wrote: ?Is 
it that words are suddenly small, or that we are suddenly large, that they cease to 
suffice us (to thank a friend?)? (Thackery in Sewall 1963:65). Perhaps as 
Thackery writes: the increase in awareness of a person, is accompanied by a 
decrease in the effectiveness of words, to express the newly acquired excess of 
thought or emotion. 
 
Therefore there are seemingly contradictory influences and methodologies in the 
approach to my verse, but as aforementioned each poem requires a unique 
application of poetic devices, experience and procedures. In this regard Heaney 
(1980:52) rightly discounts placing too much emphasis on this process: ? ..it is 
dangerous for a writer to become too self-conscious about his own processes: to 
name them too definitively may have the effect of confining them to what is 
named.? 
 
 68
 Reflections: Poetry as a mirror. 
 
A requirement of the Master?s Experiments in Telling course, during the final 
semester of 2003, was the submission of five poems. The possibility of producing 
a volume of poetry arose from my experience of composing these poems. I have 
elected to work in the genre of poetry because in the writing of poetry, my voice 
began and continues to emerge. In the space of poetry a vehicle for 
communication has been discovered which best presents my experience of both 
the physical and spiritual aspects of  life. 
 
Lived ?moments? of personal significance tend to adhere to my mind in a very 
visual way. These moments are revisited in an attempt to understand their 
meaning or significance. Arguably this is similar to the form and structure of 
poetry which  presents in the manner described the inner most longings, desires 
and difficulties of the poet and then attempts some form of resolution. 
 
?Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,  
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring  
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme  
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.? 
 
 
This final stanza of Heaney?s poem ?Personal Helicon? (Heaney 1990:9) 
describes the heuristic nature of writing poetry which has clearly emerged in my 
experience of writing the verse in the anthology. Heaney in ?Preoccupations? 
(Heaney 1980:43) refers to the development of his poetic voice to various 
?selves? Regarding his poem ?Bogland? he states that childhood memories, 
cultural associations or beliefs, and his Irish nationality wove together in his 
mind to create the poem. Similarly I can trace these in my verse. For example in 
?My brother and I? childhood memories: ?He the cowboy with/ silver plastic 
coated guns,/ and I the Indian..?, cultural beliefs: ?smoothing my long skirt/ over 
my knees, and smiling...? and Jewish consciousness: ?I fear I shall die there,/ 
drowning in soil..? together created the poem.   
 
 69
 The tension between individuality and collective religious, historical identity 
created a personal struggle which is reflected in the poetry. As Yeats puts it ?Out 
of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry? (O?Donoghue 1994:135). An 
example of this is the poem ?Mikveh? which is concerned with the Orthodox 
Jewish ritual in terms of which, a married women is required to immerse herself 
in a ritual bath (a mikveh) of exacting proportions twelve days after her 
menstruation. During the twelve days she and her husband are forbidden any 
physical contact. When the woman goes to the mikveh she undergoes a ?spiritual 
rebirth.?  
 
Various aspects of the Mikveh experience reinforce this notion of rebirth. The 
woman must have no ornaments or barriers between herself and the water, for her 
emerging from the Mikveh is analogous to the newborn leaving the waters of the 
womb (Appel 1995:1). The laws of Mikveh derive from the Torah (in Leviticus) 
and from Halacha (law). 
 
?Mikveh? explores the woman?s quarrel with herself and her religious, historical 
identity regarding this practice:  
 
?I stumble but try  
to remember that this is  
one hour in a whole month ? 
but a man  
draped, in tallis and tefillin,  
thanking Him  
for not making him a woman,  
flutters over my memory.? 
 
                                                   (stanza 6).  
 
The writing of the verse has therefore required personal authenticity. I have come 
to recognise that as Woolf wrote so beautifully in Orlando (1928:167): ?.. we 
write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls 
the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the 
liver.? I experienced the ?truth? of this statement in the writing of the poetry. 
Appiah ( in Taylor 1994:154) points out that the development of individual 
 70
 identity and so authenticity is developed through dialogue with one?s society. A 
self is that which one creates or ?makes up?, so that a life is like an artwork 
whose ?creator is, in some sense, his or her own greatest creation.? There is a 
concept such as this in Jewish thought: that when a life is completed and a person 
stands before G-d, He will not ask why s/he, wasn?t as great as the prophets, but 
why s/he wasn?t the best s/he possible. As Browning put it: ?My business is not 
to remake myself,/ But make the absolute best of what God made? (in Breathnach 
1997: February 4). 
 
The writing of poems such as ?Mikveh?  has led to an uncertainty as to where and 
if I still can call myself a ?religious? Jewess. In difficult moments such as these I 
attempt to work through it and consider the poetry as a personal reflection which 
may not necessarily question my commitment to Judaism. ?Mikveh? may be 
considered by some to amount to betrayal, since it negotiates both within and 
without communal and religious structures. My supervisor suggested that I must 
remind myself that the poetry does not ridicule but rather reveals the rich 
complexities of belief and belonging. If I were to consciously avoid such 
complexities, I would not be able to write authentically and perhaps not at all. 
Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary  (ed. Bell 1997:248) in this regard:  
 
? Father?s birthday. He would have been ninety-six, yes, today; and could have 
been ninety-six, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life 
would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no 
books; -inconceivable.? 
                                     ( Monday 3 September 1928). 
 
The question that arises is, what happens when the poet discovers part of 
him/herself of which s/he was previously unaware? Rivka Eiferman (in Berman 
1993:450) describes her experience of  the process of writing as leading to the 
examination of her inner world. She states that if the writer fails to work through 
what is encountered, his/her writing may be impeded or as in her case entirely 
held up (she further asserts that ?writer?s block? may be the result of such failure). 
I discovered this when I wrote ?At death they come?: until I had dealt with the 
issues relating to the ethics of writing, and personal and communal responsibility, 
I was unable to ?complete? the poem, nor begin another. 
 71
  
Memory has played a significant role in my verse (see aforementioned). It has 
also been an intersection between personal and social consciousness. Heaney 
writes regarding ?Bogland? that he had an unrealised need to make a congruence 
between memory, bogland and Irish national consciousness (Heaney 1980:54). 
This can be seen in my verse. For example: my great Aunt Miriam, represented in 
?Family Album?, lived in my memory as a painful personal reminder of the 
Holocaust and came to represent Jewish collective suffering and its 
consequences. As a child I wondered how many baths she must have had since 
the Nazis had ?stamped? her, and thought how it had never faded. This is 
symbolically represented in ?Family Album? by its continuous hidden presence 
sometimes unconsciously revealed:  
 
?(one day she absently pushed up 
her sleeve, and there was a cattle  
stamp on her arm).? 
                                                                       (stanza 4)  
  
Her placement in the poem does not reinvent the past, but serves to provide 
significance to her unrecorded life (besides those of the Nazis? carefully 
documented records) and is an expression of memory and Jewish consciousness.  
 
As AR Ammons stated at an international poetry convention in Pittsburgh, ? 
Poetry is a verbal means to a non verbal source? (in Epoch 1968:114). The 
source, the unconscious, then exists outside the perimeters of language and is 
accessed through words and so expressed in poetry. Perhaps then, poetry 
becomes its voice and the poem is not only my voice, but the voice of my Aunt 
Miriam and those depicted in the ?Family Album?. Phillips (2000:1971) writes: 
?The unconscious describes an apprehension that there are other minds - other, 
that is, than the one we easily recognise - going on inside us; that there is 
something inside us, and between ourselves and other people...? The role of the 
collective unconscious though at times incoherent, plays more of a role in the 
writing of poetry than we recognise. Heaney identifies its presence in his poetry 
 72
 when he writes that ? Little did they - or I - know that I would filch it ...? (Heaney 
1980:54). 
 
Similarly the operation of the collective unconscious is evident in my poetry, in 
such poems as ?Family Album?: ?...hand over her eyes./ ?This is the Jewish soul 
you hear,/ but cannot feel.?(stanza 9). It expresses the Jewish belief (at times 
unconscious) that gentile communities, cannot and do not understand the extent 
of the collective suffering of the Jewish people. In ?Blue? the collective 
unconscious  is also reflected: 
 
?I ask her in my dreams. And she 
tells me. ?For you, mein kind. 
For you. (She lights another). 
To be, what ve couldn?t.? 
                                                                           (final stanza) 
 
It expresses that as a member of the Jewish community there is a responsibility to 
remember Jewish collective suffering and further, despite and as a result of 
?freedom? from the physical and spiritual constraints of the past, there is a duty to 
remain within those boundaries (this is arguably an unconscious knowledge 
which is not necessarily directly communicated). It is a duty which leaves the 
speaker of the poem immobilised and unable to move ?forward? metaphorically 
or at all: ?to be, what ve couldn?t? (final stanza). It is for these reasons that she:  
 
?... wake(s) up and look(s) at my (her)  
hands, veined, and feel(s) the sweat,  
wet. And wish(es) that I(she) had her 
blue Ford, to take me(her) there.?  
                                       (final stanza ?Family Album?)   
 73
                          
The verse creates the difficulty of translating a Jewish world for a gentile 
community. My supervisor and I have endlessly debated the necessity of 
translating Hebrew or Yiddish words and phrases, for the reader. He views 
translations as unnecessary as they tend to be adequately explained within the 
poems. Other writers use ?foreign? language in their work, without the provision 
of translation (see for example McCarthy?s ?the crossing? 1994 which includes 
large tracts of dialogue in Spanish which he doesn?t translate for the reader) and 
such ?failure? in fact contributes to the work?s meaning.  
 
Aharon Applefield stated in an interview with Phillip Roth (2002:36): ?What has 
preoccupied me and continues to perturb me, is this anti-Semitism directed at 
oneself, an ancient Jewish ailment which in modern times has taken on various 
guises... It took me years to draw close to the Jew within me.? It is perhaps the 
anti-Semitic Jew within myself  that is afraid of exposing and presenting Jewish 
thought and language. The source of this kind of self hatred suggests Taylor, 
(1994:36) is a consequence of the internalisation of an inferior, demeaning and 
oppressive image. The presentation of my poems then (without accompanying 
translations) seeks to remedy this on both a personal and collective level of 
identity. 
  
The recognition of Jewish culture, thought and religion as valuable to Jewish 
identity formation is directed not only to a Jewish audience, but to the human 
community as a whole. Rockefeller states (in Taylor 1994:97): 
 
 ? We also need an enduring sense of belonging to- of being a valued part of- the 
larger whole which is the universe...Moreover, from a cosmic perspective, all 
peoples together with their diverse cultures may well possess inherent value and 
belong in some ultimate sense.? 
 
This may be viewed as idealistic but such idealism has been the making of much 
of my poetry. 
 
My development as a ?poet? and my ?working method? have emerged largely 
through the engagement of my supervisors with the initial outpourings of my 
 74
 verse, while it was still in process. I learned to trust their judgment and 
suggestions because their supervision has not been polemical. They pointed out 
the difficulties in my verse and consequently I was enabled to recognise, and 
develop a method to deal with them. This was achieved largely by 
experimentation and my reading of other poets. Athough it is largely unconscious 
I have  through their comments and my reading, developed a ?third eye? which is 
able to identify the ?problems? of the initial and later drafts of a ?poem?. While I 
still give them and a select few my ?verse? while it is in process, I do so on a less 
frequent basis. I wrote in my Writer?s reflexive journal at the end of 2003:  
 
?It worries me to a certain extent, that without the valuable feedback I received 
during the course, I would fail to recognise the inadequacies in my writing. I 
often wonder what I am going to do when I will not be able to rely on it. Perhaps 
this is the reason it is important for a writer, to set up a network of other writers 
on whose opinion they can rely.?  
 
 
Dr Titlestad commented in this regard that while I am very adept at taking advice 
and following recommendations, I might as a writer wish to stand up more for 
some of my ideas both against the class and his recommendations. He suggested 
that in failing to do so, I may make changes that compromise what I am trying to 
accomplish.  
 
Experientially I have found that ?ill considered? and polemical views tend to 
complicate my difficulties with a poem. For example ?At death they come?, is a 
poem which I had in mind for a long time and was afraid to write. When I 
showed it to a member of my family, he became outraged and fearful of the 
consequences of my writing it. I became obsessed with questions relating to the 
ethics of such writing. In this regard I was sensitively guided by Dr Harris, who 
advised that adopting a cautious attitude and avoiding the expression of my 
concerns, the specificity of my poetic voice would be lost. She encouraged me to 
see that my poetic voice will reflect my faith and that my poetic writing, be it 
faith, community, family, nation and so forth, is made more emotionally and 
spiritually subtle by allowing for an entire complex (and painful at times) range 
of human emotions. This has to include critique, or ambivalence, or pain, or 
 75
 disagreement, or solitude that may be painful for those I know to read my work. 
However she suggested  that if they read my work well, the love and agreement 
and cohesion as a community and all the other things I love in my people will 
also be apparent to them. Regarding my responsibility as a ?poet? to my 
community, she enabled me to see that it is as much a responsibility to challenge 
as to celebrate.  
 
Neruda (1971:4) has stated  ?..the poet must take part, the poet will take part, in 
the sweat, in the bread, in the wine, in the whole dream of humanity.? He raises 
the question as to the usefulness of poetry. In psychoanalytic language the poet 
Phillips (2000:19) states,  is  ?often linked, in some obscure way, with fantasies 
of freedom and independence: the poet represents the apotheosis (at least for 
some people) of self-becoming, of individuality, of difference..? Although a poet 
is not a bread maker nor a wine maker and does not contribute a ?product? which 
physically aids humanity s/he arguably, as the poet J.V. Cunningham (in Phillips 
2000:33) wrote, ?enable(s) us to see how we could think and feel otherwise than 
as we do.? Poetry therefore may have the capacity to extend the range of human 
experience and understanding beyond the confines of the personal.  
 
Further Phillips (Phillips 2000:27)writes: ? Poetry is words hospitable to 
interpretation, words wanting to be subject to multiple perspectives. Words that 
are inspiring because they resist fetishization, because they are not propaganda.? 
He explains that as a result poetry is communication to which we cannot remain 
indifferent. Consequently poetry may in the hopeful words of Neruda (1971: 4)  
?constitute the building of a community, the changing of the conditions which 
surround mankind, the handing over of mankind's products: bread,  truth, wine, 
dreams.? Although ?Wandering through Water? does not serve any particular 
social, political or feminist ideology, it attempts to reflect on experience beyond  
individualistic confines. As such it negotiates both within and without those 
structures which separate and may reflect on that which binds humanity on 
psycho-spiritual levels of experience. 
 
 
 76
  
 77
 Bibliography 
 
1. Ammons, AR ?A poem Is a Walk?, in Epoch 18 (Fall 1968) 114-19. 
International Poetry Forum April 1967.  
2. Appel, A ?All About the Mikveh?,1995. Available 
URL:http//www.aish.com/torahportion/appel/All_About_the_Mikveh.asp 
3. Appiah, KA ?Identity, Authenticity, Survival, Multicultural Societies And 
Social Reproduction? In Multiculturalism: examining the politics of 
recognition. Ed. 
Taylor, C and Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. 
4. Applefield, A ?Aharon Applefield? In Shop Talk, A Writer and his Colleagues 
and Their Work Ed, Roth , P. London: Vintage, 2002. 
5. Barthes, R ?The Death of the Author? In Image Music Text Ed. Heath, S. 
London: Fontana, 1977. 
6. Berman, E Essential Papers on Literature and Psychoanalysis, New York: 
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