2.2b Life's Journey: "Tahlequah" and "Life's Journey"

In response to Teri's life's journey poem, Deborah shares the end of a journey of a mother and baby Orca based on the real story of Tahlequah, the mother carried her dead baby for 17 days. Then Sue shares a poem that describes accompanying her father during his last, hard days, also with an ocean allegory. The show notes have links to the pretty print versions of these poems with artwork, plus some information on items mentioned in the podcasts

What is Follow a Fish Poetry Conversations and Inspiration?

Explore poems read by the two authors in conversation with each other, then follow your own fish to unlock your own creativity, and share it with us.

Deborah: 00:14

Welcome or welcome back, dear listeners. This is Deborah Backelschmidt here with my neighbor and friend Sue Boudreaux, settling in once more for the conversation and inspiration that our Follow a Fish poetry podcast. Today, the fish that we are following, inspired by the very moving poem shared by yesterday's guest, Terri Edlinger, is life's journey, especially as that journey entails loss. I am going to read for you my sonnet, Tahlequah one. In 2018, the Orca mother, Tahlequah, carried her dead calf for seventeen days and more than a thousand miles.

Deborah: 00:55

The poem is a response to that event. Tahlequah one. Beneath the northern stars on the Salish Sea, a mother orca circles with her daughter, lifting her infant to the air that she might breathe again. This baby, born to water, lived only minutes, and has not drawn breath for days. Yet still yet still her grieving mother will not let go, cannot accept her death.

Deborah: 01:28

This is a mother's vigil like no other. One day for each month of her pregnancy, a thousand mile wake, a tour of grief, a crying out for us to feel, to see, to act at last on our inmost belief. O Tahlequah, whose name is like the water, we must do this for you and for your daughter.

Sue: 02:01

Well, thank you, Deborah. And talking about the unimaginable grief of losing a child so beautifully told through the whale's tragedy. I loved some of the lines particularly. Beneath the northern stars on the Salish Sea. I like the rhythm of that and the sense of darkness and, I don't know, moonlight on the water.

Sue: 02:22

I love the lifting her infant to the air that she might breathe again, which is just heartbreaking. And a thousand mile wake, a tour of grief crying out for us to feel to see was also beautiful. As you know, I mean, I'm not a trained poet, but you said this is a sonnet. Could you tell us what that means?

Deborah: 02:44

Sure. Yeah. These days, a sonnet can really be any 14 line poem with no other rules whatsoever. But this one is a more traditional one. Originally, a sonnet was all written in pentameters, so five stresses per line, very often centering on iambic pentameter, which is da da da da da da da da da da so like a heartbeat, five heartbeats in a row.

Deborah: 03:10

And there's a set rhyme scheme. There are various kinds of sonnets. In this one, I'm using A B A B, then C D C D, and then the last the first eight lines can set up the poem, and that's called the octave, and then the second grouping is the last six lines called the sestet, at which point there's usually a turn or a volta. So the poem takes a kind of an unexpected tour, and the rhyme scheme can be quite varied.

Sue: 03:45

So it sounds to an amateur really technical. Yeah. And I guess it's also got a real poignancy and a real honesty to it. But I can imagine that it's quite a tension between doing something that's so kind of structured, while maintaining the honesty of, the sort of emotional honesty of it. Can you tell a little bit about how you manage that?

Deborah: 04:09

You know, that's a really great question. And actually, I have found that writing a very controlled form like this can be tremendously cathartic if you're dealing with grief. For example, I wrote a whole set of, I think it was 12 sonnets following an abortion that I had really mixed feelings about having. And this was after I had already given birth to three children, so I knew this was a child. There was no argument on my mind whether I was terminating a life or not.

Deborah: 04:39

Writing the sonnets was one of the most healing things I could do, because I had to wrestle with the form and I had to shape my grief in a specific way. It it was like a ritual. It was like a spiritual ritual.

Sue: 04:56

So it's almost like it doesn't allow the kind of untrammeled wailing that you could imagine from something like that. Yeah. And sort of containing it. Yeah. I had never thought of it like that.

Sue: 05:08

But you have a point. When I have an artwork assignment that has some boundaries,

Deborah: 05:14

Right.

Sue: 05:15

I find that I can play within those boundaries in a way that's unexpected, and sometimes reveals things that I didn't know about myself.

Deborah: 05:25

Yeah, that's so true. And you can always do free writes in the case of writing poetry. You can write the whales. You can write all of it down, right? But then when you choose to turn it into a poem, you make choices.

Sue: 05:39

So maybe if we do that workshop that we're talking about, maybe you might be able to help people to maybe make something into a sonnet or into some other format of poem, kind of once they've got it down.

Deborah: 05:53

Sure, if that's something that people would like to do, that's certainly

Sue: 05:56

an option. It just seems so ambitious to

Deborah: 05:59

write a sonnet.

Sue: 06:01

But what an interesting way of framing it. And thank you also for being so incredibly vulnerable I about

Deborah: 06:08

didn't even know I was going to say that.

Sue: 06:12

So I guess that adds a real depth to this poem as well. I mean there's the extra grief of course with whales that realizing how sentient and deep whales are, the same creatures whose oceans we're filling with plastic acidifying and warming. I mean I just don't even know what to say about that. So

Deborah: 06:33

did you intend this as an oblique way to address a parent's fear of losing a child, or is this more about nature and other sentient beings? This was really about the plight of the whales and about our relationship to the natural world, but as we've said before, there's no controlling how a poem lands, you know, in any way that it lands is valid, and if it has that resonance for people, then I'm honored by that.

Sue: 06:58

And there's something that just suddenly struck me as the water births. Oh. With the baby swimming up through Yeah, the

Deborah: 07:07

because we're all water creatures, right? I mean we are little fish in

Sue: 07:11

the womb. Right, right. It's a little pool. Yeah. By the way, I don't know if you knew this, but blood plasma and the ocean are similar osmotically.

Sue: 07:21

I mean it's an echo of

Deborah: 07:24

our evolution. Wow, I did not know that about blood plasma, but I have heard, you know of course that we are what, 80% salt water in our constitution?

Sue: 07:33

I don't know exactly the percentage, but it's a lot. A lot.

Deborah: 07:39

It says, you refer to the innermost to act at last on our inmost belief. I was wondering what you were referring to. I didn't want to be preachy, but I do feel that so many people, probably all people if they are allowed to access their inner feelings, have a deep regard for nature and would really love to honor and support nature.

Sue: 08:03

And it says, what must we do for you and your daughter in the final line?

Deborah: 08:09

We must do this, meaning everything that we can Right. To help other creatures help the biosphere. Right.

Sue: 08:16

Right. And it's interesting to me how we frequently choose not to do those very things that would save us both literally in the longer term, but also spiritually in the shorter Yeah, exactly. Where we get so terribly disconnected disconnected from nature and from the tiny beauty around us.

Deborah: 08:36

Yeah.

Sue: 08:36

Which is one of the reasons why both you and I love writing poetry and listening to it.

Deborah: 08:42

Yes, right. And it is beautiful to see people who have been divorced from the natural world have a return to it. I taught for years at a summer camp for kids from Oakland and the Berkeley Oakland border in the flats who had not been able to have those weekend camping experiences, whose experience for the first time in the woods at Casadero Music Camp was, you know, kind of boggling, terrifying for them even. I remember one time there was a spider in one of the cabins, and the little girls came shrieking to me in middle of the night. We had to work through this fear.

Deborah: 09:18

We built a great big spider out of paper mache and put it on a web that we built out of torn up sheets in the trees, and kind of to make the spider more of a friend. So and you could see over the course of the summer, these little girls just becoming more comfortable in the natural world and really connecting to it. It's a beautiful process. Wow. Yeah, I've been to Casadero.

Sue: 09:40

It's a famous camp in the woods near to the Russian River.

Deborah: 09:45

Yeah, Yeah, in Jenner.

Sue: 09:47

You use line breaks in a surprising way, sometimes starting a sentence in the middle of a line. How do you decide where to use line breaks? And basically tell a little about how you use punctuation in a poem more generally.

Deborah: 10:01

Yeah, wow, great questions today. So because this is a sonnet and the land lengths are dictated by the form, the line breaks I mean, you do still have control over where the breaks occur, but they often do end up in interesting places with which is when the sentences carry around from one line to the other. For example, yet still her grieving mother is at the end of a line, and the next line begins, will not let go. So that's on Jean Mon where it wraps around, and those things can be really interesting. So, yeah, it's a balance between what the form dictates and the control that the poet has over where the line breaks occur.

Deborah: 10:44

And as for punctuation, I believe that we should punctuate as we do for prose. In other words, put your commas in the right place. It's okay to not have complete sentences. Know, sentence fragments are fine, but you do have a complete sentence, punctuate it like a sentence.

Sue: 11:03

Yeah, and I think that that probably leads to something that you and I have talked about before, which is I don't want ever to write something where the reader has to work too hard.

Deborah: 11:13

Yeah, that is the reason I do it, is that, yeah, the punctuation helps the reader, and why take that away from someone? You know, why make it harder? I mean, understand with the experimental verse how sometimes leaving the punctuation out allows more flexibility in the interpretation. And so there's that I'm not saying that's bad, but for me as a poet, I'm making the choice to mostly use standard punctuation.

Sue: 11:38

Yeah, thank you. And finally, could you tell us what does Tahlequah mean?

Deborah: 11:43

Yes, so even though Tahlequah Oh, Tahlequah, sorry. Oh, that's okay. The whale is part of this pod in the Salish Sea up in the Northwest, but the word is a Cherokee word. And there are various etymologies given, but the one that is the most common is that comes from the words ta li gu, and I'm not sure I'm saying that right, but it means two is enough, which I thought was beautiful when you think about a mother and her child. Mhmm.

Deborah: 12:12

But the story is that there were three Cherokee leaders planning to meet to select the capital site, and only two arrived. And the other they waited, and they waited, and they waited. And by dusk, they decided two was enough.

Sue: 12:24

Interesting. To make the decision. Well thank you. In the interest of time today, perhaps we won't read deep because I'm going to be sharing a poem as well. Yeah.

Sue: 12:33

Perhaps we'll just go straight into that if that's okay. So this poem was written at four a. M. When I woke up with jet lag after what is probably the last visit with my dad in England last week and it helps me to share it with you. I'm not sure why.

Sue: 12:48

I guess it's an oddly lonely time all round. This poem is called Life's Journey, the prompt that I gave yesterday, and it's got an epigraph from Charles Baxter with his poem, The Arrow by Day. The words not of now but of the horizons forever, rolling and thunderous and then at the instant softened in consolation. I sit next to my dad. He's grunting and twitching his leg, consumed with thoughts and end of life dread.

Sue: 13:23

There's an ocean of silence between us, so much still left unsaid. He opens his eyes and looks at me. Oh, sweetie, he murmurs. So I go and sit on the arm of his chair and take his hand, which he squeezes, his face all bruised from a small fall. He looks like the beast, but I don't really care.

Sue: 13:47

I see through it to the small signs of who he used to be. And then he surfaces, reassuring himself about the financial futures of my sisters and me. He drifts back to waving distance, not quite to shore, where I'm watching from the beach, the horizons forever beckoning merging twilight sky with the sea.

Deborah: 14:20

Such a tender yet real poem about the end of life. I remember you reading this at our open mic. And then when I saw it on the page for the first time, I was actually struck by how compact it is given the immense emotional territory and personal journey that it encompasses. And I highlighted some words that I really love, lines and phrases. There's an ocean of silence between us.

Deborah: 14:51

This is how you introduce your ocean metaphor that recurs in the middle and at the end of the poem. But here, it carries all that is still left unsaid. In the section where you just describe in detail, he opens his eyes. You go and sit on the arm of his chair and take his hand, which he squeezes. And this is so real and tender, just full of telling details.

Deborah: 15:16

We're right there with you. The fact that you are looking past the bruises to the small signs of who he used to be, it's a very moving window into what we know is a long time relationship. And then he surfaces, and again, we have this water image, water swimming. And in the last lines, he drifts back to waving distance, not quite to shore, where I'm watching from the beach, the horizon's forever beckoning, merging twilight sky with the sea. This is the complete realization of your ocean metaphorous, gorgeous ending in which you seem very aware of your own mortality as well, and perhaps more than aware, perhaps curious and compelled by what is possible.

Deborah: 16:08

And I wanna ask you more about that later. But first, the epigraph is so beautiful and apt. How did you choose it? How did you find it? And did it come before or after the poem?

Deborah: 16:19

It's something

Sue: 16:20

that I've been aware of for years. I've saved this poem in my on my hard drive. And it was written in response to a poetry competition around the King James Bible. Oh. So they actually took verses from the King James Bible.

Sue: 16:38

The arrow by day is actually a little quote from, I think from the Old Testament. Oh, didn't know that. And there's just something gorgeous about this idea of the sort of the horizons forever and the softness of the colors of it and the distance of it. I don't I just I can't really explain why, but I I found it an incredibly moving few lines. I don't I can't say I totally understood the poem.

Sue: 17:05

But they're also, you know, softened in consolation. Yeah. I mean it's like when you see a rainstorm coming and you see the rain shadow underneath the clouds, it's almost like God's thumb has smudged it. And it came well before the poem. It's just been rattling around in my mind.

Deborah: 17:26

And then when you began the poem, did know you were using that epigraph, or did you add it after? Well,

Sue: 17:33

the landing on the horizons forever was certainly something that I felt I had to kind of give credit to that.

Deborah: 17:41

Ah, right. Okay, that makes sense. That's beautiful. And when in the writing of the poem did you realize you were working with this ocean metaphor?

Sue: 17:53

There are so many cultures where death is feeling like you're pushing a boat out to sea. And there's a scene in, it was one of C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, which had an underground sea, had a subterranean sea. And for some reason that stuck in my head as well.

Deborah: 18:15

Yeah. So did, you handled the metaphor really well the way you introduce it, and then you have that little flash of it again, and the word surfacing, and then you really round it out at the end. Did you have to rework the poem to make that work?

Sue: 18:28

A little bit, because I didn't want to mix metaphors. Oh. That'd be really annoying. And what I want to be careful with when I'm writing either prose or poetry, or particularly a story, is the fictive dream. I would like to cast a spell over the listener and bring them along, and what I don't want to do is to jar them out of it with something dumb or with something discordant or unbelievable.

Deborah: 18:54

Yeah. Or artificial in some

Sue: 18:56

sense. Right.

Deborah: 18:57

And this feels very grounded in the emotional reality of the situation. Is it true that you felt I mean, this is the way I read the ending, but did you feel that horizon beckoning to you as well as to him? Oh, wow.

Sue: 19:14

No I don't, not in this particular case. I'm so focused on trying to kind of feel my way into my dad's reality. Yeah. Trying to walk along with him at least as far as I can. I don't feel like I'm endangering myself or my It's not to say that I haven't felt the beckoning from time to time when I get really depressed.

Sue: 19:37

Oh. But this is, I'm actually weirdly not that depressed because it is part of life's journey.

Deborah: 19:46

Yeah.

Sue: 19:46

And to accompany somebody turns out to be something that I've always been a bit afraid of. But it turns out that the mercy of being able to do this for him is something that I'm glad to be able to do. And I would feel so much worse if I hadn't done that. And now I'm in the dilemma of you know, do I go back for his last breath? And I think the answer is probably no.

Sue: 20:14

Because we've said our goodbyes and he was so sad on the

Deborah: 20:17

night that I left. Oh, right. You'd have to say goodbye again. Feel like Yeah, you've done

Sue: 20:25

you know at a certain point I just want to launch his boat off gently into this sea.

Deborah: 20:34

Oh, it's so sweet, so loving Sue. That's beautiful. And I guess I didn't mean, what did you feel the horizon beckoning in the sense of, did you feel drawn to death, but in the sense of, are you curious about it at the end of life?

Sue: 20:56

I don't, no not exactly because the horizons forever doesn't feel like something where things happen much. It's sort of going off into this hazy darkness.

Deborah: 21:09

Yeah.

Sue: 21:10

So I'm not especially curious, I just hope it's a gentle journey. Yeah. You know, not too many storms. You know, at the end of life, in hospice care, you're prescribed morphine or OxyContin or something like that. So, you know once you start taking that, you're starting on that journey.

Sue: 21:29

Right. It all sounds awful when you're not at that point but when you're with somebody who has so little quality of life, anything that can be a mercy to them. Because this grunting that he does is not exactly pain but it's a kind of suffering that he wants us to know about. And that was really hard for several days to sit next to somebody doing that.

Deborah: 21:54

Oh yeah.

Sue: 21:55

So, and this poem is a little bit like, people say, well what was it like? And I'm like, here you go. Here's a

Deborah: 22:01

poem that tells I'm read this. And then I'll hit the back about it again. Right, right. Oh, and you've written so beautifully beautifully about it, and what a gift you're giving him at the end of his life. It's just beautiful to hear about this.

Sue: 22:14

So did you want to read your prompt?

Deborah: 22:16

Okay. I will read the prompt. How can a pilgrimage or a journey become a ritual that brings healing in the aftermath of loss? And here is some inspiring etymology for us. Did you know that the word heal comes from the Proto Indo European kylo for whole, uninjured, which in itself is not too surprising, but also became words like hail, h a l e, whole, health, and here's the one that really blew me away: holy.

Deborah: 22:50

Please send your poems to us at curiositycatpodcastgmail dot com. We will be excited to read them, respond to them, and perhaps include them in a future show. So thank you so much for listening today. As ever, our show notes are in the description of

Sue: 23:09

the episode or at curiositycatpodcast.com with links to further resources, as well as details for our monthly poetry open mics at the Good Table gathering space. Speaking of which, as I said earlier, we are thinking of taking an inspired by art outing to Oakland Museum in place of an open mic shortly to indulge in a bit of ekphrastic poetry, poetry that's inspired by art and tea and cake, obviously, at the excellent museum cafe afterwards. As a side note, the poetry open mic is open to visual artists too, or both. If you have poetry inspired by art or art you think might inspire poetry, bring it along. We will also be launching a generative poetry workshop where we will set you a prompt.

Sue: 23:56

You'll have 20 to find a nice spot to sit and write, then gather and share what you've come up with. Details will follow and see our website. The music in this episode is Andalus by Emile Pessar, played by our very own Deborah Backel Schmidt, production show notes and editing by Sue Boudreaux, that's me, here in El Sobrante, California.