POETRY -

I have not been one to enter contests at all...and there is a reason for this. I have bought lottery tickets for a number of years and i have not won at all. I am too realistic to think i would win the jackpot which is what draws in the lottery participants to buy multiple tickets to be 'in it to win it'...so I just buy the one ticket and rationalize "if I am to win, then the one ticket is more than enough"...and every week at the friendly corner lottery kiosk old Zack checks my ticket against the winning number results and tells me, “sorry Mary you are not a winner this week", and with that i say "oh Zack...just tell me I am a loser". We both laugh at my joke but I can tell that the joke is getting old, and sweet old Zack is kind, and I move on thinking well, maybe next week and life goes on.

So you may be wondering what I am doing entering this contest and submitting this essay about my creative passion which drives me. My quick answer is - I am the eternal optimist and I have to use a vehicle to bare my soul because this hidden and secret passion of mine, known to a very few of my family and friends, yes...my craft which now drives me was once a little seed of encouragement planted in my heart by Sister Patricia (of the Holy Cross Convent, which is situated almost at the tip of Southern India near KanyaKumari - the tip of India where three oceans meet...each bringing with them their respective beach sands - yellow, black and red...courtesy of the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea). That planted seedling has been nurtured within me and has pretty much driven my passion and my project which is now almost complete.

For you to put all of this in context, I have to go back a some years... When I was in high school (the said Holy Cross Convent) I used to submit my essays in class, wishing I could use a pseudonym. Always praying that Sister Virginia (our English Language teacher) would stop that horrible habit of having the best-in-class-essay read out aloud by the author of the essay in question. I always thought to myself that this habit of hers did not sit well with the not-best-essays submitted.

Nine times out of ten the best essay was written by my best friend Shakuntala. She was a true artist with words - for example - if we got a truly dull topic of writing an essay on the Indus River in India, odds were that the best essay was by Shakuntala, and when she had to read her essay out in class we would be taken on a magical but factual and historical journey from the source of the Indus River, tucked high in the mountains of the Himalayan range which fed the Indus with its snows and ices and glaciers, and we would be taken on an adventure, courtesy of Shakuntala all the way across India from Tibet to Pakistan. I have since lost touch with Shakuntala but I hope she has pursued and perfected her art, and used her great gift of telling stories.

In my high school years, I always felt my writing to be stiff and awkward to, and even at that time though I knew I had no specific writing style to speak of...I knew that I did have a voice and somehow, just as youth will not be denied, this voice within me had started taking on a life of its own, and I knew it just had to be heard.

I have to digress a bit here and revert to Sister Patricia...I had a special relationship with her (as one of the students she felt comfortable with in terms of asking for work to be done...work which was outside the curriculum and in my case it was cutting fabric squares). She was our sewing crafts teacher which covered embroidery, teaching us all sorts of stitches to be done by hand - from simple hemming to back-stitch, to chain-stitch, to darn-stitch, to cross stitch and so many others - and what Sister Patricia needed was fabric squares. A couple of stores in town would occasionally donate a batch of remnant bolts of material to the school, and being a star math student, if I may say so myself, Sister Patricia pressed me into service - apart from wanting the squares to have edges that were straight cut, and exactly the same size, she needed to get the maximum amount of squares out of the remnant piece of material - taking into consideration the width of the fabric and the yardage of the bolt donated. I had to calculate the area and decide upon the size of the squares to deliver to Sister Patricia and give her my best forecast. In other words, in addition to getting her the optimum amount of squares for her current class load, she also required a stock of these squares for the students in her other classes and I suppose until the next donation.

I have to digress further here to give you the whole picture...my Uncle Leonard (a Chief Engineer Officer working for the India Steamship Company) made an unscheduled stop at Helsinki Port because his ship had developed some minor problems and needed repair and it followed his ship was stuck in dry dock for approximately four weeks... As he waited for the repairs to be done, apart from enjoying Helsinki, which port he had never visited before...there he met a young woman from a nearby town and to cut a long story short...a few months later they got married. Her name was Maia. Her passion in life was dressmaking and she fell in love with the colorful fabrics of India and this only heightened her great love for her craft. The main point of this digression is that Aunty Maia used to go to her home in Finland during the month of May every year, without fail. Before leaving she would present to some lucky family member or friend her complete set of her needlework tools replete in a workman-type apron which she had designed with each instrument having its own particular tailor-made sheath. She would replace her supply with new ones which she brought back to India for her own use until her next annual visit back to her home in Finland. I underscore here that this was not a lottery type thing, or a contest...Aunty Maia had her own system by which she chose the lucky recipient...was it by age or relationship of who was close to whom on the in-law family tree, or was it a thoughtful gift to someone who appeared to need it more at that time, than others?...I will never know.

One year i got a set of these scissors and it was during the penultimate year of my high school program. Showing off one day I took the set into school, and then in a very spontaneous moment I gave this prized family gift which was given to me, to Sister Patricia. I did not regret this at all because this set of many pairs of various types of scissors overwhelmed Sister Patricia. Sister Patricia was from Ireland, and knew their value right away, and, at that time, these instruments were scarce and expensive in India. Obviously, she knew the value of these various types of scissors and their respective uses. And, I have to say that the use of these scissors for the fabric squares certainly upped my cutting skills, but more importantly it brought Sister Patricia closer to me as a mentor to the point that one day I confessed to her how jealous I was of my best friend Shakuntala's writing skills, and how that feeling weighed heavily on me.

I fully expected Sister Patricia to launch into a lecture about how I would be heading down the path to hell if I felt jealousy for anyone (it being one of the deadly sins) but she did not refer to it at all, and instead, she just asked me what my main heartfelt interest was, and what I really loved doing... and I told her it was poetry...I told her how I loved reading all kinds of poetry, and I had some favorite poets whom I admired over others. I also told her that I had started writing poems of my own, albeit quite primitive, and I also told her that I had not shown any of these poems to anyone. After hearing this confession of my secret, I was terrified that she would ask me to show her some of my poems, but, strangely enough, she said, and, of course, I paraphrase here - 'don't show anyone what you value, such as your poems, because sharing your poems with someone before you are ready to, will dilute it's value to yourself...so keep it as your secret until you can be sure that you have taken it to the level of your idea of perfection of your poem'.

Thinking back, I wish I had asked her what her passion was, or if as a nun was she allowed to have any passionate interests such as writing, or music, or painting....I will never know.

And I have told you all of this because???... at the risk of sounding self-indulgent and pandering...you must have guessed by now that all the sets of scissors that Aunty Maia used in her needlework kit - her treasured collection - were always of the Fiskars brand.

A true daughter of Finland, she was so proud of the fact that this company had been in existence since 1649 and she regaled us with the story of how the famous orange color came to be. In 1967, plastics as a commercial product, worldwide, was booming, and Fiskars had designed a pair of scissors which would be more user friendly (or ergonomic a la the prevailing culture of the 1960's). Apparently, the story goes that the designer had just finished producing a juicer prototype for orange juice and instead of changing the plastic material to black to produce the new ergonomic scissors prototype (which color the new scissors design called for), the designer thought he would use what plastic material was left in the machine and, voila, that happy orange decision made by the designer, gave birth to the most iconic pair of scissors known all over the world. The best part was that it was not his intention...he was merely being pragmatic with regard to time and materials because he rationalized that it was, after all, a prototype and subject to a few more tweaks before it was finally approved. Little did he know that the corporate heads took a vote on the new color he had stumbled upon and the orange color won hands down by a vote of 9-7.

Now to get to my creative passion......in my life so far - i have experienced much pain and hardship...the loss of my grandmother and my grandaunt (I was extremely close to both of them), the loss of my beloved parents, many miscarriages, many heartbreaks, the loss of friends, some far too young to even think of being no more, and sadly one cherished friend by her own hand, the disappearance of my Aunt Norah (my mother's sister) who had never been seen nor heard from again after relocating to Glasgow, Scotland, with her husband...serious illnesses of my siblings and finally myself, a terminal illness for which currently by the grace of God I am in remission. Then, of course not too many people have escaped Covid19 - my experience with this insidious virus in January of this year was quite serious but I have survived it, again, with God's grace. Of course, the other events that happen in one's life - harassment of me as a child and a woman in the workplace, and betrayals by friends, by lovers and some folk...whom you would have least expected it from.

I recorded these events in my life in poems, and it has been cathartic for me to do so. I hope one day to publish an anthology of my work - some of the poems have been written in different poetry styles - sonnets, different rhyme schemes, free style, a modified pastoral style, epic style, haiku style, and so on and so forth. How I have made this book different is that, because it is autobiographical, I am featured in the photo-art of each poem. The poem book is created in photo-art format and I fervently hope at the very least you enjoy reading the samples I have attached to this essay.

Some of the good times I have enjoyed in my life have been recorded as well, but more emphasis has been placed on the pathos because many people struggle through a lot of heartache and pain, and it is my belief that if someone is going through tough times, if they read that others have struggled through pretty much the same events, then that someone would believe that he or she is not alone and there is hope and belief that these tough times will pass and that that someone would get through it and survive. I would love to feel that my passion had meaning to others, if that the reader of my poems would understand that others have it hard as well, and that when adversity comes their way, and they pose the question of 'why me?' to themselves...they instead change the question around to 'why not me?'...This creative passion that burns within me bids me to trot out that well-worn cliche - "what does not kill you makes you stronger" and it is this confidence that strengthens you so that when next time adversity comes your way.....you are then up for the battle with full spiritual metal jacket.

I have attached four of my poems -

(1) Dancing in the Moonlight in your Forest - (a happy woman though still not confident enough to know her worth)

(2) The Holes in my Heart - (the pain and suffering one goes when you lose specifically, a lover, or a mate....but could be modified to pertain to the loss of a family member or a friend as the whole thrust of the poem is to do with loss)

(3) The Modern Windhover - (this poem deals with a weak and unfaithful and feckless person in your life)

(4) Hey Uncle Ralph - I was only Six - (the abuse and harassment of some women throughout their lives - referencing the #metoo movement)

Numbers (1) and (3) are the prototypes for the look of the book. My interpretation from the perspective of my book, is that the way I use the concept photo-art in my book is that it is a conflation of several images to produce a final singular image which parallels the story I am telling in my poems. So in order to get any idea of how I want to present this pictorial interpretation of my poem, I physically cut out and around the images, sometimes loosely silhouetting the various images I want to use...I place them physically on a board (the old fashioned way....shhhhhhhh) and when I have a 70% positive idea of how i wish the image to be interpreted. Then I go to my mac and using the graphic artist apps at my disposal to create a final image. And, yes....I use the Fiskars orange colored scissors to cut up and shape the images I am considering to use. And, of course, there is the occasional time when I am reminded that I am, perhaps, channeling Aunty Maia, and she is smiling down on me.