The Poetry Project

Alisha Mascarenhas

The morning after your death, the news comes quick and bright as the sun. Flat light of November and the murmur of life all around. Leaves split and wither. We drink coffee and share an apricot pastry. I am sitting with you / the morning after my death / not having the means / to feel any sorrow.1 We are joyful with you, crying with awe and this loss. Etel, you showed us totality. The inclusion of everything in every thing. With your attention to the work of spirit, you knew how to reach within and towards life. How to be awake as a child to the phenomenal nature of being. You have helped us to continue; to live our lives, never firm or stable. How exquisite and direct your transmissions. You have amazed us with your ability to be delighted, curious, perceptive to beauty; showing us how poetry makes the erotic and the intellect meet.2 The writing you leave us with makes it possible to recognize that which, in feeling, can be so totally bewildering, chaotic, incomprehensible. Your life’s work transmits its truths across mediums: so sensitive to the sacred experience of existing in this world, being human in the brutal, extraordinary presence of the weather. 

Etel Adnan, The Spring Flowers Own, The Post-Apollo Press, 1990.

2 Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog, Nightboat Books, 2012.

Etel Adnan Remembrances

Elsewhere