Survivor

When the pandemic breaks apart, it leaves cracks in us all,

Jagged edges of rusty voices escaping isolation with us all.

As walls became too familiar and rooms much too small,

Some bear confinement like a fracture that ran through it all.

While exposure is risky, innovation responds to the call,

Some patch together solutions on small screens for all.

Scrambling away from the carnage and memories that maul,

Some are left with what they had kept hidden exposed to all.

The ones you have to look out for

are the ones with hairline fractures.

What you can see you can splint

to support the healing of fractures.

Have you examined your x-rays, poet,

closely for calcification in fractures?

A sonzal combines elements of a sonnet and a ghazal with a twist, and in the process gains gravitas. Both forms have long traditions in love and longing. During the covid shutdown, we longed for human connection across the landscape of pandemic distance. Survivor grapples with the losses experienced during the pandemic and how they have changed us. A number of my friends use the term The Before Time with a note of nostalgia. It’s unclear what the long term effects will be in the aftermath. I was curious about what happened to human beings under a great strain during the event.  Geology and Amit Majmudar’s training as a radiologist provided the images. (I don’t mean to lean on wordplay here. I just can’t think of a more accurate way to say it.)

The fourteen lines with a volta in an eight/six pattern comes from the Italian sonnet. I enjoy the gradual development of thought in this pattern more than I do the English one with three quatrains and a resolution.

The division of those fourteen lines into couplets can be traced to the ghazal. Each line of a ghazal’s couplets are traditionally independent clauses or sentences. The discontinuous nature of the couplets in ghazals disrupts the expected development of the poem. I do not live in a world filled with independent clauses. I live in a world of fragments. So they are something I accept in my poems, but not without questioning if the broken structure is performing the work I want it to. Often the work of the fragment is closely related to the line break, one of a poet’s strongest tools. A fragment can also disrupt the expected development of the poem.

The right justification of the final six lines recognizes that twelve languages are read from right to left. Among these are Arabic and Urdu, two of the languages of the ghazals of antiquity.

In each of the parent forms, rhyme and repetition create a sense of connection. With sonzals, the reader is tasked with jumping from stepping stone to stepping stone. The unexpected spacing on the page offers their writers and readers a different experience in processing thought.