(no subject)
Oct. 19th, 2009 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseI'm a little afraid to post this because
A) I feel like I'm crap at poetry, and this (Like the sonnet, which i may one day edit for this reason) is not even an hour old.
B) While the choice to *keep* the word girl was as deliberate as was the choice to drop the word "Oriental" (Because girl has a specific and valid meaning) it might be seen as problematic in itself.
C) Shweta_Naryan, as usual, started the theme (She also caused the sonnet that I did a while back, unwitting), and did a much better job in much less space.
(Read her lovely poem Here. ETA: oops. I failed to notice, in spite of her saying so explicitly, that she's locked it temporarily to give Star*line the chance to respond publicly to a complaint related to the poem she's responding to. I'll make sure to mention it and re-link if she opens it to the public. Because it's so much better than mine.)
D) Not sure if all the formatting will survive lj. (ETA: Yup. All the spacing within the lines went away. Oh, well.)
An Asian girl dances:
In hip-hop clubs
Laughing
Pony-tailed, among friends
Raises her hands in the air.
Like the music tells them all to do.
In the India School of Dance
On St. Mary's Road.
Urged by her mother when she was four,
Still struggling with the perfect precise shapes
her fingers will someday make.
All alone,
Hiding in the basement,
because she loves to wheel and twirl
But her big brother said she looks dumb.
So she hides
For now.
Maybe when she's six
She'll risk the living room again.
At the Ballet
For the first time
A minor part,
Toes taped,
Costumed to look like all the others
Hair bunned
Body aching
Forgetting the audience
Until the applause and the curtseys.
(In a few years,
when she thinks she'll feel like a grown woman,
a real member of the Ballet
Good Enough
Maybe she'll get the lead?)
At a multicultural festival
In the Korean Youth Troupe
Displaying months of effort for strangers
A display indeed,
But no more so (and no less)
than the green-skirted
White-cheeked
Irish girls
Both are watched with bemusement
Amusement
By visitors from Sierra Leone
Viet Nam
Germany
Across the street
Waiting for a bus, earphones on, barely moving.
(But you can guess the beat
if not the style
of the current song
from how she bounces)
At a rave.
On Broadway.
At her boyfriend's party.
In front of cameras.
With her father.
With your daughters.
In daylight.
Out of sight.
In Kyoto
New York
New Delhi
Melbourne
Amsterdam
Morocco
London
Rio de Janeiro
Half a block away,
And for sheer joy.
A) I feel like I'm crap at poetry, and this (Like the sonnet, which i may one day edit for this reason) is not even an hour old.
B) While the choice to *keep* the word girl was as deliberate as was the choice to drop the word "Oriental" (Because girl has a specific and valid meaning) it might be seen as problematic in itself.
C) Shweta_Naryan, as usual, started the theme (She also caused the sonnet that I did a while back, unwitting), and did a much better job in much less space.
(Read her lovely poem Here. ETA: oops. I failed to notice, in spite of her saying so explicitly, that she's locked it temporarily to give Star*line the chance to respond publicly to a complaint related to the poem she's responding to. I'll make sure to mention it and re-link if she opens it to the public. Because it's so much better than mine.)
D) Not sure if all the formatting will survive lj. (ETA: Yup. All the spacing within the lines went away. Oh, well.)
An Asian girl dances:
In hip-hop clubs
Laughing
Pony-tailed, among friends
Raises her hands in the air.
Like the music tells them all to do.
In the India School of Dance
On St. Mary's Road.
Urged by her mother when she was four,
Still struggling with the perfect precise shapes
her fingers will someday make.
All alone,
Hiding in the basement,
because she loves to wheel and twirl
But her big brother said she looks dumb.
So she hides
For now.
Maybe when she's six
She'll risk the living room again.
At the Ballet
For the first time
A minor part,
Toes taped,
Costumed to look like all the others
Hair bunned
Body aching
Forgetting the audience
Until the applause and the curtseys.
(In a few years,
when she thinks she'll feel like a grown woman,
a real member of the Ballet
Good Enough
Maybe she'll get the lead?)
At a multicultural festival
In the Korean Youth Troupe
Displaying months of effort for strangers
A display indeed,
But no more so (and no less)
than the green-skirted
White-cheeked
Irish girls
Both are watched with bemusement
Amusement
By visitors from Sierra Leone
Viet Nam
Germany
Across the street
Waiting for a bus, earphones on, barely moving.
(But you can guess the beat
if not the style
of the current song
from how she bounces)
At a rave.
On Broadway.
At her boyfriend's party.
In front of cameras.
With her father.
With your daughters.
In daylight.
Out of sight.
In Kyoto
New York
New Delhi
Melbourne
Amsterdam
Morocco
London
Rio de Janeiro
Half a block away,
And for sheer joy.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 12:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 02:46 am (UTC)I'd tell you to look at Shweta's, but, as I belatedly discovered, hers is (possibly temporarily) friends-locked.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 02:39 am (UTC)(If you mean the Star*line one that caused both she and I to break into fresh poetry, well... not only was that exoticized, but it was generic. Of course, when I say that I'm all too reminded of Oscar Wilde asked if a particular book was perverted.)
If you mean her own... thanks still, but I *really like* her poems.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 02:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 03:33 am (UTC)She has posted very few poems that haven't instantly gone in my memories file so I can look at them again later.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-20 01:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-23 05:51 am (UTC)*blushes and hides under the table*
no subject
Date: 2009-10-23 05:50 am (UTC)Have not been keeping up with my f-list, and so I missed this till
And I don't buy the silliness about mine being better. They are different. So there.
(Not going to unlock my post at the moment, btw, cause
no subject
Date: 2009-10-23 06:02 am (UTC)I think yours has two advantages: Point of view (Mine is necessarily more outside), and managing to say as much in less space.
Those are perfectly understandable reasons to keep yours locked. And if there are results in said Movement, let us all know!
no subject
Date: 2009-10-23 06:13 am (UTC)I would say that it's better to have the outside POV and the inside one both, rather than one being inherently better. They reveal different things. Sure, if one is only going to have one, it's good to have the inside one 'cause it's overall lacking in the culture, but we get both this way.
And they counter the original in nonidentical ways. Also, you totally captured a childhood learning-ballet moment of mine, which, given that it sort of feels like you reached into my head & pulled it out & let me see it, influences my opinion some!
(And I'll let you know what happens once I have something to report!)
no subject
Date: 2009-10-23 07:48 pm (UTC)This makes me feel especially good.
(The five-year-old girl before the ballerina is a nine-year-old me (and my older brother) combined with another friend's experience at five with singing. Which is presumptuous on my part, but...)
no subject
Date: 2009-10-24 12:18 am (UTC)