PAPER POETRY SERIES: WABI-SABI: 3rd POEM

A Patchwork Beast

Beauty in “Ugliness” : Wabi-Sabi

I don’t care for leaning into the hurt.

Stewing in crystalline mud and, meditating on the chills that run through the undercurrent of my skin.

Rather, I prefer moving, moving — exhausting my legs — an attempt to surpass the clouds’ pace overhead, until I reach the goal at rainbow’s end.

Why would I nurture a perversion of nature?

I understood C.S. Lewis’s philosophical apology, charging all that is bad as corruption of the first — the good.

And why console the soulless?

Hypothermia will take your toes without consent, like the thief that sickness is;

and without hands to fulfill the steal, corrosion has not a feeling of remorse, nor before that, does it gather a thought of recourse.

Why of all would I coddle a patched beast? A whimpering monster — and one who outlives me!

Why would I stand at mirror’s reflection, to meet the eyes, peering over my shoulder — and then, gently, to pull its mottled body over, and feed the creature from my breast?

But I am not the first — the unadulterated good. Maybe I, too, am a patchwork quilt.

And maybe that aching, chasing me, no matter how far I crawl from the crying, is spawned from the compounding atop my heart; a futile labor, and I birth a diamond of guilt.

Tripped, I fall far beyond the pot of gold. I lay prone on quickened earth, too weak to drown me in the clutching decay beneath…

And the little pleading beast, curls

into the daisy-perfumed space, sandwiched between my shattered shoulder and my stained — but dimpling — cheek.

~Written by Chloe Paulina Hawes

Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese concept meaning Beauty in Imperfection.

The third poem in Poetry Series Wabi-Sabi took me longer than anticipated, and I deeply thank Indubala Kachhawa and PaperPoetry for showing me such kindness and providing such freedom to express myself during this project, without the additional pressure of tight time constraints. Truly wonderful people work at Paper Poetry.

Originally, we planned to publish A Posture of Hands as the third poem of this series, but ultimately I didn’t have the necessary resonance with that poem to proceed as such. I’m sure anyone reading this understands what I mean. So, while this poem, The Patchwork Beast, might be an outlier, I also feel it belongs right here and right now. I hope readers will agree, and maybe even find resonance with this poem.

Wabi-Sabi is a notion much like Eudaimonia.

Eudaimonia was a Paper Poetry and Literary Impulse prompted contest of which several pieces, including my poem “Many Dandelions”, were selected for presentation within an upcoming anthology. Brilliant works by other writers, along with my poem, can be found in the following link, so check it out if you find yourself interested:

So very much awaits us the more we come to learn; ideas might have no terminology in the language we speak, but in another tongue, the same idea might spawn a million more precious thoughts and feelings. Imagine if we could each speak and understand every language on the planet. Imagine. Learn. Speak. Create. Love.

Stay tuned for the fourth and the last in the Wabi-Sabi Series — A Posture of hands.

Editorial Note: Paper Poetry publication runs a themed poetry series every month. If you wish to be a part of Paper Poetry series, please email [email protected] with the subject line “Poetry Series writer request”