HDeverell19 GOST Creative

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.