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Palindrome Haiku

Syllables forming
Words telling tales telling words
Forming syllables.

I love palindromes. Maybe it’s connected to my fascination with time and movement, how we go from one place to the next, one moment to the next, and can never really go back. Even if we do return to a physical location over and over, it’s never the same because the moment of our return is different from any preceding moment. But with palindromes, you can go both ways. There’s a built in circle, even in a line.

I love palindrome numbers too, like when a digital clock reads 11:11 or 10:10. I was delighted the entire year I was 55 because of the doubling of the digit, the tiny palindrome. One day at work during a staff meeting we were talking about how cool it would be to have a baby on November 11, 2011 — 11/11/11. We even calculated when you would have to get pregnant to try to have a baby on that date.

So, I hope you enjoy my attempt at a palindrome haiku. It’s late, it’s been a long day, a long week (it’s only Tuesday!), a long month, you get the idea. When I have more brain power I’m going to try a more fully realized palindrome haiku. It would be a tiny exercise for trying a crown sonnet some day (15 sonnets, exploring a theme, with each of the first 14 sonnets linked by having the final line of each be the first line of the next sonnet, and the 15th and final sonnet being made up of the first lines of the preceding 14 sonnets in order).

Here are some word phrase palindromes, I found at Wikipedia. “Fall leaves after leaves fall”, “You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?”, “First Ladies rule the State and state the rule: ladies first” and “Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, sees boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl”. The crown sonnet of palindromes may be a character by character and word by word palindrome – “Level, madam, level!”

What about a palindrome crown sonnet?

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Charleston Flowers

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It’s November.  It’s getting dark.  Back home there are a few sprawling Johnny Jump-Ups still peeking their tiny yellow and violet faces from the garden bed, and the sunburst of a couple Black-eyed Susans still holding on.  But here there are flowers spilling over wrought iron fences, climbing trellises, clumping along the edge of the sidewalk and covering bushes in yard after yard.  Thinking about the long, flowerless season I’m heading into at home, I’m charmed.  Yes, this is a beautiful city.

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Retarded

It’s currently considered rude to use the term retarded when referring to people who are developmentally disabled, even though a few decades ago that was the only term used.  The shift in language is important, because there is great stigma attached to the word, and it inappropriately lumps together a host of developmental disabilities with a wide range of effects.  But there is a state the word conveys perfectly, which Adrienne uncovered in the months after Eric died. 

“Hey, we’re retarded,” Adrienne said one day when we were sitting on the porch, unable to read, unable to garden, unable to do anything besides sit there and stare and talk now and then.  According to the American Heritage Dictionary, retard means “1. A slowing down or hindering of progress.”  Bingo.  No progress other than breathing, a slow down in every function of our daily lives, like getting out of bed in the morning, cooking meals, doing dishes, making phone calls, getting back into bed at night.  We were good at grieving and spending time together and not much else

Unfortunately, the definition of retarded still means “affected with mental retardation,” and the slang definition for retard is “a disparaging term for a mentally retarded person.”  But retarded can also mean “relatively slow in mental, emotional or physical development.”  Take out the “physical” and “development” and there it is.  We were definitely relatively slow in our mental functioning and our emotional state was stuck in a permanent wail.  We were bogged down with grief, slogging through each day, and unable to process even basic bodily signals like hunger and the need to sleep.  Retarded.

What brings this up now?  Although my sister’s diagnosis of a recurrence of cancer is nothing like Eric’s, and she is already on a treatment that has a good chance of working, just hearing the news of cancer returned in the body of someone I love set off the grief retardation tremors. 

“I was retarded yesterday afternoon,” Adrienne told me, a couple days after we got the news.  “I just sat on the couch and stared into space.”

And I have been retarded too.  My reading dropped off, my concentration was shaky, and I felt this extra weight across my shoulders, making my already tight neck muscles like stretched strings.  It’s eased up, which is how I can now see that it happened.

Retarded.  I’m making a case to reframe the word in a way that isn’t disparaging to a diverse group of individuals, but rather affirming of a natural reaction to the tough side of life.