Sonia Ruthele Novak - Strawberries (1927)

Forgotten Poems #22

  
       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.
  

Sonia Ruthele Novak (p. 1923-30, etc.)

P: Contemporary Verse (1923+), Argosy All-Story Weekly (1925), The Lariat (1925+), The Medical Herald (1925), Munsey's Magazine (1925+), Good Housekeeping (1927), The New Yorker (1929+); A: Independent Poetry Anthology (1925), Anthology of Magazine Verse (1926); C: Winds From The Moon (1928); etc.

Like many free-verse poets of the 1910s and 20s—Yone Noguchi, F.S. Flint, Edward Storer, Hilda Doolittle, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, et al.—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 tanka translations from 1899, for instance;

  
       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.
  

The influence of tanka and haiku on early-1900s free-verse is something I plan to unpack in more depth at a later date, but for now, here’s a poem of my own, written directly after reading Novak . . .

  
              For Sonia Ruthele Novak
                      by Dick Whyte

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

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

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More poems about kissing . . .