Saraswati's Lament — Poetry
Poetry
Saraswati's Lament
Barbara Roether
ISBN: 978-1-7324369-0-9
82 pages, 4.25"x 7", Perfect Bound
Pub Date: 1/15/19
"Always there is a story you are part of," Barbara Roether writes in Saraswati's Lament, "and another story you don't understand." She has forsaken all she has to come to the "empty rooms" she inhabits in Bali, in search of being, of liberation, of those dark ways of affirmation that living, in the profound sense, elsewhere is. "Do we contain each place already?" she asks. These poems would answer that question not only about Bali, but its stories, too and of herself as re-teller of them. And 'yes' is what they come to find.
--Peter Weltner author of You Wait for Me Where Mountain Peaks Are White as Your Hair (Marrowstone Press)
Bird Taxis
How they were here all along
the taxis painted with blue birds
driven by men in blue shirts
not driven by birds but
so what if they were?
We could learn to accept that too.
Do we contain each place already?
Is being new to any country
about having to remember
what it was we’ve forgotten?
Take us back to the beginning
the scent of cloves
hunger of temples
hollow interiors
the end of Ramadan
the start of Galungan
tiles awaiting tiles
on rooves
awaiting rain.
Barabara Roether is a writer and teacher recently exiled from San Francisco to Asheville, North Carolina, where she now hosts a literary reading series. She is the author of the novel This Earth You’ll Come Back To (McPherson & Company) and a poetry collection, The Middle Atlas. She frequently reviews books, and writes of faraway places whenever she can, a travelogue of Japan is forthcoming. For many years she worked in book publishing as an editor and created the series Signs of the Sacred with Harper Collins Publishers. There is more information on her website BarbaraRoether.com.
