Sunday, August 7, 2011

Richard Foerster's "Savasana" on Poetry Daily

Richard Foerster's "Savasana" (pronounced "shavA-sanA") is a good poetic rendering of the so-called "corpse pose" in yoga. If he hasn't done a series of yoga pose poems, then someone should! I call Warrior. Once I started doing yoga about ten years ago, I knew that a door had been opened in me that I hadn't known existed. It was as if all the codes of Western masculinity had forgotten about the most basic human action: breathing (kin to being)...



Savasana


The corpse I am become
lives in pure counter-
poise, between weight and
weightless tidal flow, its breath
osmotic, its pulse subsumed. Here
is death beyond fear, without
want of resurrection, unyoked

from hate or any spur to forgive,
where all the masks of God
melt into irrelevant silences.
Here the body surrenders all
tethers to the past, its crowns
and cups of woe, and hope's
a stain absolved of any future,

where the only present is presence,
a nothing that is everything stillness
yearns to inhabit, that lights
no way to or fro. Dark bliss!
Yet give me back, for now,
my stuttering heart, staccato air,
the buzzing contagions of the world.



Richard Foerster


Penetralia
Texas Review Press
reprinted at POETRY DAILY www.poems.com

2 comments:

Mary Sheean said...

Bring together the mind power (chitta) of our consciousness in the world, and the life force (prana) that you find in the bliss of Savasana, and one is doing yoga all the time. That's what it's all about, finding this bliss in and out of the flow of our days.

Philip Metres said...

I'm trying, Mary! Some days all peace evades me.