Poetry

Poetry in Oslola was something ordinary people did and had no stigma attached to it. It came from the tradition of the early sagas, which were written in rhythmic stanzas and passed down orally. The Algics had been doing something similar even before that but the earliest Algic poems were written down by Scandinavians.

Cobian wrote poetry in the same ways some girls like to draw, or play piano. It was not a solemn enterprise that required something to say and an education to say it, it was just done with some interest and some effort. It was a satisfying sort of hobby.

One day she was in the park below Moshel Street School. She didn’t have a blanket with her so she just sat in the grass with one leg stretched out and the other tucked beneath her to steady her notebook.

The flowers bloomed late this spring;

She gently kisses

A reaching hand

She looked at her work. ‘Gently kisses?’ Is that really the best she could do? She crossed it out and wrote above it, ‘slowly kisses.’ Then she looked at it again and wondered if she’d made it worse. Tzipora sidled over as she frowned at her pages.

‘Hello,’ Tzipora said, tapping Cobian’s outstretched foot with her shoe. ‘I got you a peach one,’ and she held out a bottle of soda. Tzipora loved soda, which she called fizzy drink, and probably had two or three bottles a day.

‘It’s more for the heat than the taste,’ Cobian said, and took the cool bottle in her hands and tutted at the condensation that had formed on it. She wiped her hands on her skirt.

‘What are you writing?’ Tzipora asked, and sat down near her and broke the seal on her drink with a hiss.

‘My short poems,’ Cobian said, ‘try not to interrupt. You have to let the words occur spontaneously and balance their feeling. If you talk I can lose the word and with it my whole poem.’

Tzipora nodded and sniffed and rubbed her nose. She liked the sharp, painful sensation of drinking the bubbles quickly.

‘What about this one?’ Tzipora said, leaning forward. ‘He was struck in the head… and he… fell to the ground laughing.’

Cobian shook her head. ‘That doesn’t even mean anything.’

‘No, it means something. Look.’

She gestured for the notebook and Cobian grudgingly obliged. She wrote it down in English amidst Cobian’s semantic Oslolan rune forms.

Struck in the head

And he

Fell to the ground laughing

Cobian looked at it for a moment, and after a moment longer she snatched the notebook back. She looked up, scowling at Tzipora.

‘Well… That’s… That’s better than mine,’ she said, irritated. ‘And in English? Are you kidding?’

‘Why, what does yours say? In Oslolan?’

‘It doesn’t matter what mine says,’ Cobian snapped, tapping the pen against her head rapidly so that it made an audible plastic sound. ‘How did you do that? Where did the idea come from?’

‘It speaks for itself,’ Tzipora said simply, a simple look on her face.

‘I don’t understand it. Did you think of it earlier?’

‘It just came to me then.’

‘Just like that?’

‘It emerged.’

Cobian’s pulled her outstretched foot back in and crossed her legs. ‘Well, it’s good,’ she was mumbling, ‘it has a lot of energy behind it. It sets a scene well. Is it humorous? Is it sinister? It’s very direct.’

She snapped her fingers and looked back at Tzipora. ‘It’s a modernist poem,’ she said. ‘You’re writing directly, in the proletarian style. It’s no wonder I can’t capture that; I’m working in the traditional Oslolan form. It has energy from its bluntness, the way I write is indirect.’

‘Maybe you should become a modernist proletarian like me.’

Cobian waved her away, frowning and staring off into the distance as she thought out loud.

‘Perhaps English lends itself better to direct forms, since it is not a semantic language. It can be ambiguous but it is astringent; it lacks the shades of meaning of Oslolan logographs. But that may work against traditionalist forms.’

‘I think it does,’ Tzipora said, finishing her fizzy drink.

‘Would you be serious?’ Cobian said, ‘I’m trying to take this seriously, to figure out the heart of my issue.’

‘Why not capture this feeling? Write it out in the modernist style in English, just to see how it feels? Maybe it would suit your style.’

Cobian reached for her pen and tried to capture the feeling.

Stupid English

Enriches the other

Full of bubbles

Cobian looked at what she wrote, and said, ‘this sucks.’