PAPER POETRY SERIES: WABI-SABI: 2nd POEM

Our Shaken Snow Globe

Beauty in Ruin: Wabi-Sabi

How can I write of beauty in ruin when writing is my very exorcism? Demons crowd the page laughing and dancing. and mocking me.

Now my mind is buzzing for the things I could say from a wonderment of the suspect shaping the eyes in my “o’s” to subjects more intangible. Like ghosts of inked words, thoughts dodge my inquiring inner flashlight.

Do you glean my meaning?

Once, she gleamed, moving with me, highlighting my every periphery. and then — she vanished, as though she wasn’t, isn’t, and never will be.

That’s transience at work. and the more things change, a perfect multiple of my age, the less solid I become; the more my edges blend into empty space.

I won’t pretend to be something I’m not as though the $200 metal urn makes up for the messiness for the tragic fragility of the ashes within.

But you feel it too, don’t you?

That, we shake the earth — the parts of ourselves that are always — That, we long to fill the air with the evidence of our burnt offerings

..to color every inch of this place with the same horrid gray.

..to fill all our mouths with the same chalky taste.

..to feel the same needling in our eyes we can’t blink away.

But some force is out there, stronger than the entire human race, unimaginably acting in uniformity and for all our grief and self-hatred that force, in love, holds our shaken snow globe steady.

Wabi-Sabi (beauty in imperfection) ~Written by Chloe P. Hawes

When I first set out to write this piece in creative freedom — to commit another attempt at completing a Wabi-Sabi-themed poem particularly arisen from my higher self — my expectations were…nonexistent.

No thought of integration arrives when that blissful state overcomes and silences my analytical, critical, and unconscious mind. But that state of being I refer to, maybe what some label as “inspiration”, is necessarily and bafflingly honest.

Bafflingly, (not only because it’s a really fun word (haha — say it ten times fast)), but because personal truths formally hidden from me (and maybe you, too) will suddenly appear on the page, appearing in the same ink as resides in the pen I hold. Our Shaken Snow Globe is a little different, perhaps, because of that veracity. The uncompromising truth, if you seek it, may startle, disturb, confuse or even frighten you.

Maybe you weren’t ready. But you leaped. Maybe I wasn’t ready, and I leaped. Release of any truths within us will almost certainly heal us.

And I think that the entire dynamics (the bravery, the endeavor, the product or conclusion or confusion that we might not want to face), like so much else in this world, is Wabi-Sabi.

In the same vein, Our Shaken Snow Globe hopes that bearing the ugly might, in its way, create some kind of beauty.

~A Note Written by Chloe Paulina Hawes

Kindly check the first poem Cracks in Our Sky for more hues of Wabi-Sabi (beauty in imperfection)

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