Sonia Ruthèle Novák - 3 Short Poems (1925-1932)

Forgotten Poems #116 || Reissue #20

   
              —: Strawberries :—

       My kisses
       Are drowsy, honey-colored bees.
 
       My thoughts of you
       Are sweetgrass baskets
       Lined with dewy leaves.
 
       Your words
       Are wild strawberries
       To my insatiate ears.
 
       Crushed strawberries
       Leave indelible stains.
   

    
              —: A Dream Garden :—

       Do you ever dream of a garden
       With flagstone paths
       And a lily pond—
       A garden with old-fashioned flowers and new?
       Do you dream of a baby that prattles among them?
       I do!
   

    
              —: Calendars :—

       The dust-grain is an embryo of stars,
       And stars are future grains of dust, for time
       Is not. The senses feel the changes prime
       Their moves and call it so. Our calendars
       Are transient booths in transient gnat bazaars
       To be destroyed in evolution's climb
       From out the phases now achieved of slime;
       And in destruction, wreak no jot that mars
       The mighty scheme of oneness. Merge and merge
       A hundred billion times or more, we serve
       Colossal ends that bolt the spheres and surge
       To rest upon a needle's point! No swerve
       Can separate us from the central urge,
       When every straight-hewn line is but a curve.
    

Sonia Ruthèle Novák (p. 1923-27, etc.) “was educated in the South. Her poems in the Atlantic Constitution attracted national attention and won the highest critical praise. A book of verse, under the title Winds of the Moon, was published last year.” (The Century, 1929) “The Fifth Avenue Bookshop, at the Hotel Brevoort, New York City… is conducting a series of poetry readings. On February 13th our contributor, Sonia Ruthèle Novák, will read a program of her own poems after an introduction by J. Allen Dunn.” (Contemporary Verse, 1927)

Like many shorter free-verse poets of the 1910s and 20s—Yone Noguchi, F.S. Flint, Edward Storer, Hilda Doolittle, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, M.R. Lowe, et al.—while Novak works comfortably in traditional forms like the sonnet, in some of her poems Novak appears to be drawing on Japanese tanka and haiku structures, whether directly or indirectly. ‘Strawberries’, for instance, neatly breaks into two strikingly tanka-esque stanzas of 5-lines each;

    
       My kisses
       Are drowsy, honey-colored bees.
 
       My thoughts of you
       Are sweetgrass baskets
       Lined with dewy leaves.
    

Compare this to W.G. Aston’s popular tanka translations from 1899;

    
       My love is thick
       As the herbage in spring,

       It is manifold as the waves
       That heap themselves
       On the shore of the great ocean.
    

     
              —: After Sonia Ruthele Novak :—
                              by Dick Whyte

              & now
       i can’t remember
       the exact shade
       of pinkish-purple
       scattered
       through the colourless
              clouds—

              & even if i could
       some things
       bear repeating—
       we each have
       our own dusk
            to tend
                   to—
    

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More about tanka . . .

More poems about love . . .

More poems about kissing . . .

More poems about gardens . . .

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More poems about the universe . . .