Helen Deverell
English II
Ms. Hume
4/12/17
The following found poems are from separate chapters using words and phrases encountered in said chapter. Aforementioned poems will explore certain motifs and themes in the novel.
Death
The family, huddled next to a dead bee in a coffin flower,
watches a sunbeam crisscross in the clouds and
realizes it was lent to them too briefly.
Their over-smiling lives have a size and a shape now-
now that grief has grieved.
Now everyone was a secret,
and sad breasts sat atop sad hips,
dropping and swinging like
sad stars from sad skies.
Loss
For practical purposes,
with bombs come fear and foreboding.
Even he knows that
red-veined weeping is futile
when one cannot tame morality.
Just weigh the odds and accept.
And when he watched her cry,
he learned a lesson:
while despondence is not depression,
it is a slicked-back setback
until the day that he dies.
Complacency
Lay siege to sticky floors and
a woman’s pink pallor.
Remember to catapult scraps to
sunken bodies,
but omit contact.
Drown-able men
are already drunk,
so a stranger’s rib cage
is easier to ignore.
Life for some,
existence for others.
Luck?
Is everyone’s world a world of “nos”?
“You haven’t learned...”
“You can’t jump...”
How’s the little supposed to
know what the big isn't supposed to do?
Pocketmoney doesn’t pay for moonbeams,
it pays for heat and sweat and
the color yellow.
Sometimes, dirt colored vomit.
White is not a brownwebbed color.
White is not hot or sweaty or yellow.
White means “yes”.
Sometimes, peppermint.
Time
God leaves behind a rainbow film of gasoline
but not much else.
To some,
time is not a line but a squiggle,
and history is nothing more
than a forgotten scandal.
Some have been loved
since the dawn of time.
Thimbles, lit candles, and bell bottoms.
Even in black and white photographs,
one knows dark from light.
Cold
USE ME.
Brown back-freckles complement
pretty, easy-to-understand laughs, and
bluegrayblue eyes are dragonflies, not
mustardyellow.
Are beady eyes learned?
Can one choose how much to love?
She knows that love isn’t
given to dirty girls,
but she doesn’t know how to clean.
She knows that the better “she” drives
in a shark.
With teeth so sharp, they must be clean.
God
At what point does a purposeless
crucifix become sacrilege?
Discarded religion
lumps together
to form a Hole in the Universe.
When she died,
the space between her collarbones
made a home for fish-mouthed bats.
She’d have been a die-able age
if someone had been there
to witness her death.
Instead, she was almost swept up
like the floor-tile dirt.
Rahel
Rubyringed fingers hang on to dignity
like a white man’s tennis trophy.
Brown, cake-crumbed fingers hang on to
“hellos” like a white man’s
pressed knickers. Dirtied
bell-bottoms in wet-squelch
aren’t as bad as a beach-colored
girl whose Father Bear
wields flower vases as weapons.
Rahel was not a littleangel,
and that was the one thing she knew for sure
would not change.
Ponderance
If we weren’t sitting here watching the
unkissed toads,
where would we be?
Trapped in a coveted TV life?
Stuck between the cracks of the
untouchables and the “us”?
If we weren’t us,
would the leaf-backed man
with the painted nails
still be red and lifeless?
Or would he be hunting for toads with
two kids by a pond?
Twins
Anything can happen to anyone,
so it’s best to be prepared.
Write lists, if you must.
There’s no privacy as a two-egg twin.
Even the ghosts are watching.
Even a yellow wasp and a lizard’s blink.
Even a Communist and a chicken and a cow.
A lot can change in a day.
As a two-egg twin,
brittlewhite snakeskin
has to be shared
when shed.
Love
Gooseflesh, muscle,
veins in a paddyfield.
Skin to skin is a rarity
when love exists in shadow.
No trees grew alongside the love.
No birds circled it.
But love is only
defined by the lovers--
not the executioner.
Shame
Humiliation lives in the Heart of Darkness.
Despair dives and swoops and recites
a familiar mantra.
Full of women, full of fluid.
Full of children, huddled in a warm house,
sheltered from the charred wick and battlefield blood.
How much do they know?
They’ve seen how quickly
bravado can turn to menace.
Right and Wrong
She looked weak as she slept,
and all anger was summarily dismissed.
A fork and knife stuck out of
either side of her head, and
it became harder to tell
who was good and
who was bad.
The thimble-drinker
and coffin-cartwheeler
left their little
father/husband
for a whiter cup of Joe.
Would she still have been floating if
she had stayed?
Work
A rotating fan measures
its way around a circle.
Will an attempt at
prosperity for the masses
end in a blind date with history?
Ignorance had been served on a silver tray,
and he realized that hard work
did not guarantee success.
Offering
A rivers waits with open arms.
A necessary sacrifice.
In the end, water was what loved her most.
The monsoons had not come on time.
A tiny body,
an abyss.
River
“The God of Loss.”
“The God of Small Things.”
“Naked but for his nail varnish.”
Helen Deverell
English II
Ms. Hume
4/12/17
The God of Small Things Reflection
While reading The God of Small Things, I rarely noticed that Roy used the same phrase or combination of words recurringly across multiple chapters to add depth and detail to the novel’s greater themes and motifs. Before this creative project, a substantial portion of Arundhati Roy’s sensual imagery and subtle references were lost on me. It was no secret that her sentences and paragraphs were adeptly and deftly crafted, and her adjectival use and vivid color depictions stood out on the page. However, I was not quite able to piece together the connections that Roy clearly worked hard to lay out. I was often so consumed with Roy’s ornate and intriguing writing that I did not fully take note of, nor did I internalize, each character's’ respective points of view. I did not notice how often Roy described knickers as “starkly pressed”, nor did I realize how often Roy used “yellow” as an adjective to describe negative things or people, nor did I notice how Sophie Mol almost exclusively wore bell-bottoms. After deconstructing Roy’s imagery and piecing together her vibrant language, I began to see how her sentences, paragraphs, and chapters worked in congruence to contribute to overarching themes like forbidden love, anglophilia, the caste system, and two children’s juvenile understanding of what life is like as a person of color.
Rahel is merely one of the characters from The God of Small Things that I feel as though I understand more after creating my found poem. For the majority of The God of Small Things, Rahel seemed to me to be a well-meaning, if not slightly naive, young girl. However, after going back and picking apart the pieces of Roy’s writing, I realize that Rahel noticed more than I gave her credit for. Rahel describes adult situations with a childlike simplicity that I mistook for pure immaturity, but, over the years, she grasps a hold of important nuances that might have blown over the heads of other girls her age. For example, upon returning to Roy’s writing, I noticed how much emphasis Roy puts on Rahel’s infatuation with “hellos.” In my poem from chapter eight, I arrange Roy’s writing to read, “Rubyringed fingers hang on to dignity like a white man’s tennis trophy. Brown, cake-crumbed fingers hang on to “hellos” like a white man’s pressed knickers.” In the airport, Rahel notices that the way she is greeted is different from the way that Sophie Mol is greeted and different still from the way that the adults in her life are greeted. This realization contributes to her feeling of being “loved less”, and I had never before realized all the small details that Roy added to Rahel’s perspective to further her feelings of isolation and loneliness.
Although The God of Small Things is not a linear novel from a timing perspective, I read it as such. I read each page from left to right, and I did not often make the connections between the past details that Roy described and the subsequent events that ensued. In The God of Small Things, Roy took apart the pieces of her characters’s’ lives and reattached them in a jumbled fashion. The God of Small Things was a book that did not allow the reader to skim over anything, as each event is integral in understanding the novel as a whole. I took a similar approach with my found poem. In order to further understand the characters, plot line, and writing style, I took out chunks of Roy’s writing and reorganized key ideas in a way that made sense to me.
