Simonne’s Peace

Postcard by Nadine Wendell-Mojica based on opening sentence by Simonne Pauwels

WOMAN CAUGHT BETWEEN ROCKS AND TREES

Poem I wrote around a photo from Kerri Pullo, USA


Woman caught between rocks and trees

Dedicated to Kerri Pullo and Simonne Pauwels


She eats a sandwich made of stolen sea food
Worms in driftwood wanna speak to you,
she says with a swift waitress voice
to the smallest sea coast she ever saw.

In the bedroom he plays Bach because
nobody else will warm these sheets of music.
She wears an angel on her hat, goes thru his head,
because her heart swims with the dreams of disappearing fish.

I’ve buried my eyes under the giant roots of trees,
they are almost a thousand years old, he tries to explain in vain.
I’ve buried mine in rocks, she simply sings
with a seductive mermaid voice to make peace between them
as soft as possible and as understanding as the sounds of spoon and room.
He acts with hidden words instead of uncovered leaves:
I did not know rocks were almost mirrors in the golden sun!

This sentence feels quite like a quiet kiss of autumn on my lips,
such an aria and echo of her soul looking for the holes in bones.

He simply smiles.
She takes one of the rocks to show him it smiles back

Waves intervene in the debate
Wonder how to show them how to really kiss
How to kiss their naked bodies without drowning
both of them at once
How to breathe like these yielding trees near the beach,
this beach where both of them were born in different decades.


Guido Vermeulen
December 2011

TONGA THINKING

Even een gedicht dat ik vandaag voor jou heb genoteerd,
voorgelezen door een (oude) vrouw van Tonga, Konai Helu Thaman, die gans haar
leven onderzoek heeft gedaan over "how to learn and to teaching the Pacific"

Thinking
you say that you think
therefore you are
but thinking belongs to the depts of the earth
we only borrow what we need to know ...

Andere gedachte van de dag :
without knowing the culture of a child
you cannot teach a child

Email from Simonne Pauwels on the Fiji Isles