Contemplative Practices in Action II: Poetry as an Invitation to Contemplation

This article, which is collaborative in nature and based on our subjectivities, launches a series dedicated to a cluster of spheres and/or practices that are an invitation to contemplation. It also provides a follow up to the previous, an introductory article on Contemplative Practices in Action I: Contemplating.

Starting from our contemplative experiences through poetry, we seek to mirror various dimensions, in an invitation to contemplate life poetically.

Poetic contemplation from our innards

By Cristiana Oliveira

I am lava and burning sun

in continuous combustion

(José Carlos Soares)

Poetic contemplation is a contemplation of our eruptive inner volcanoes. It is an emotional contemplation of our human condition and nature, as we are matter in continuous combustion.

Touching lava burns. Looking straight into the sun blinds. Contemplating a volcano fascinates and scares us, as does contemplating on our innards. The dizzying rhythm and silence of poetry makes us dance between the twists and turns of our abysses. And we, much like professional ballet dancers who yearn for the perfect balance, running in rigid and fragile shoes, in quick and short steps, from the lava that oozes down to the depths of our most dantesque ego.

We run and flee to the sound of Stravinsky, but must remain and walk to the pace of Chopin: “The path is made by walking” (Antonio Machado). Walking: One Step at a Time (Erling Kagge), which is, taking one step at a time, is also a contemplative exercise of inner travels. Also of poetic travels. Similarly to Pessoa, we feel, therefore we travel.

We deconstruct set borders. We overflow from our temple to contemplate the river of unknown words that flow from the inside out: “Wherever the current passes, all living beings that move will live.” (Ez 47, 9). Poetic immateriality is bread for the soul and wine for the body. Sitting around the spiritual table with poetry is tasting infinite heteronyms. To declaim a verse aloud is to purge melancholy. To sing a camonian sonnet is to release the sparks of invisible love.

Besides contemplative, poetry is also sensory and immersive. For these reasons it stimulates and heightens the senses, sprawling over the palms of our hands like pollen. From flower to flower, we should be like bees and smell the flowers: “The bees and I / Dizzied by perfume” (Sophia de Mello Breyner Andersen). From leaf to leaf, we should be like turtles and read slowly: “Against all haste, the slow reading of life and text, allows something new to generate within us, a renewal that expands beyond the measures of space and time” (Miguel Pedro Melo, sj). The slow reading of life and text is an intuitive reading, attentive to what internal and external movements cause in the heart.

To linger for an instant or long hours on a poem, a stanza or a verse; to follow the cadence of syllables and to allow the wind to move us us like it does with reed in Alentejo at twilight is to go with Eugénio de Andrade’s birds.

Deep down, the poetic contemplation of Human and Cosmos is a sensitive and introspective contemplation, whole and visceral in which the truth is revealed and our freedom is liberated: “If you can look, see. If you can see, notice” (José Saramago).

Reed in Alentejo at twilight. Photo credit: Cristiana Oliveira.

What is our history made of, if not poems?

By Laura Marques

José Tolentino Mendonça describes poetry as “the useless that perfumes life”.

Poetry was written for me on the cover of my scented diary, when I was around six years old. My father would write to me as a way to say goodbye and to make himself present, whenever he would emigrate again.

In my daily life, poetic words would remain forever. Few words that would allow me to touch the familiar, the sacred, the intimate. After contemplating them for a long time, re-reading and savouring them countless times, with eyes still sparkling with water, I would run outside. My grandparents’ threshing floor was my stage. From there I would contemplate the vegetable garden full of life, the dense forest at the end, the thrashed corn at my feet. The smell of pumpkin that has just been chopped right there, to feed the animals.

After an afternoon tending to the garden

our lives

matter less

(José Tolentino Mendonça)

Growing up with the poetic writings of my father, in a small place, simple, in the country-side, my gaze lingers, watching attentively. As Mary Oliver says, “attention is the start of devotion”.

Do you want to know what I pray for?

Dry tree-trunks, logs

Fences and red clay

(José Tolentino Mendonça)

Now as an adult, I still need poetry to grow.

I still pay attention to the few words that resonate within, giving colour to the landscape drawn from my insides. To focus on the loquat tree that continues to shake in the wind, even when on the inside (and the outside) our world seems to crumble.

I still need to make myself close to that wild mulberry tree on the riverside, at the end of a workday, or to take a walk on the beach front.

Each one reads in the poem, the poem they carry within themselves

(André Tecedeiro)

Contemplation gives us back the palpitation of Life, that carries on, with us and despite everything.

Contemplation gives us back our place in All: humans return to breathing in sync with nature’s tempo, weaving presence with impermanence. How much the trees have witnessed, and they remain standing.

So many times

I say to the dew

I am as you

(José Tolentino Mendonça)

Contemplating poetry is an extremely personal experience, complex, multiversal, a mirror of Life in and of itself. The word “poet” comes from Greek poiētēs, which means maker, creator. That is the invitation I leave, in the words of two great poets of our time: to be contemplators and makers of poetry.

Poetry is not only the beautiful words we put on a page

If we make something like a poem in our life

we too can live like poets

(Satish Kumar)

All that remains now

is you becoming

the poem

(José Tolentino Mendonça)

Poetry saves me.

By Rita Lança

Sneaking through an imperceptible crevice, where I missed throwing lime under my body, preparing my own burial, poetry calls out to me and uninstalls me.

And it’s so beautiful to see how life blows through so many beings. Today it was Laurinha, who sent me my “Ghana Skin” in beautiful poetry written and drawn by rupi kaur.

And there was something of an inner resistance that shattered, the light emanating from that poetry uncovered that which connects me, reconciling me with what I cannot ignore, the broken world. That poetry echoed Fanhais’ and Sophia’s Peace Cantata inside me, I contemplate. “I see, hear and read, I cannot ignore”. Poetry has lit inside me my “human condition”, the impetus to a “new beginning” as Hannah Arendt would say.

The next revolution should be a poetic one! We might very well launch poetry by the bunches, drip it on the corners of indifference, spell it out like throwing seed to pigeons, paint our faces with it and go out into the street, proclaiming that poetry governs the world from here on out.

Poetry is the voice of earth, it is the voice of the aged who have no age, it is the voice that you cannot hear unless you listen with your heart. It is what life has chosen to display in writings, drawings, dance… that which you can contemplate but cannot grasp. It is in everything, one senses it but it isn’t obvious. It doesn’t appear naked, but undresses us, as to show the essence of reality. It is subtlety inhabited. 

It is an encounter with my world, brought by the contemplative gaze of another, who from their world invites me to enter into the world generated by our “fusion of horizons” (Paul Ricoeur).

Poetry entered my life by the hands of many, to whom I am profoundly grateful.

Our first official encounter was tumultuous. In year 7 I had a fit of rage when I told my mother that on a Portuguese Language test, the poem “Little One” from a certain Espanca had been included, and that “I would be the one to smack her” (the author was making a play on words, as the last name Espanca can be translated as - to smack). My mother, a poet by nature, smiled. As Florbela Espanca was her favourite and she told me what poetry meant to her. That conversation captivated me, by the spark in my mother’s eyes, but I was still distant, although poetry had populated all of my life, thanks to my mother. 

As the years passed, I realized that I had been contemplating reality in a very telluric way since I was a little girl. That gaze and poetic way of expressing oneself were very present in the communal environment where I grew up, even in a certain bucolic way of gazing over the plains of Alentejo, as I later deepened with my fellow countryman Bernardim Ribeiro.

The cante alentejano (a polyphonic style of singing from Alentejo - Portugal) that I enjoy to chant so much, blends a skill of speaking of matters of the soul mirrored by Nature. It expresses, through the labours of the land, the hardships that crack our bodies and urge our desires. This poetic wisdom of approaching nature as a mediator of the everyday is a contemplative lens that helps me gain perspective and narrate my story.

Poetry as a contemplative resource

Poetry is perhaps one of the most important resources of my life. It reveals to me the possibilities of contemplating mundane realism and transcending it. It reveals to me the intricacies of the world and the beauty it transpires. It communicates that which in reality is ephemeral and hard to retain, these can be deep emotions, visions of dew on plants; that which trespasses us and simultaneously harbours beauty, lightness, cruelty, uninstallment. To enter in reality that is looming harshly, fleeting like death, expressing it, naming it and making it palpable.

Entering into otherness with that certain other who torments me, looking in its eyes. The synaesthetic potential of touching mystery, of manifesting subtlety, erotism, in a world where we are continuously being injected with the undressed, where the symbolic and the imagination are banned from lives. 

From the poetic encounter through which I contemplate my story, I remember an unforgettable note from Nelson, a former boyfriend: “let me sow the poppy fields in your dreams”.

And also the encounter with Maria Eduarda, we met at an exhibition celebrating the life of the poet Eugénio de Andrade, where she told me her beautiful love story, through the letters she received from her musician boyfriend: “the poetic jazz with stanzas from Eugénio”, a relic she generously shared with me.

From those who love poetry, the choice is hard, but I leave you with Carlos de Oliveira:

The night is our gift of sunlight

to those who live on the other side of Earth.

Contemplating life through poetry is a deeply personal process that reveals our condition and profound nature. It’s a mirror of our life, of the landscapes that permeate us.

It is a practice, our companion and witness, in the path we traverse.

To us, it has become a need and a resource, an invitation to materialize in our life and in society. As written by Pablo Neruda in his poem “The Lives”:

(...) I carry within me

not my little life,

but all lives,

and I walk strongly forwards

because I have a thousand eyes,

because I have a thousand hands

and my voice can be heard from the shores

of all the lands

because it’s the voice of all

those who cannot speak

those who cannot sing

and today they sing from this mouth.