Am I perhaps a poet?

I never looked for poetry in books, I did not attend any university. I looked for it intuitively inside myself, in my feelings – and searched for the words to express it, just to emphasize what is neglected, to make the invisible visible.

In 1974, I was 35 when I wrote my first verses to express something deep down inside me that desperately wanted to be: Why are you sad? / Why are you dragging a worn-out heart / swollen with sighs? / Didn’t life teach you yet / that wisdom can arise / just where torment is burning?

Fury and fire were the starting points in my writing: A burning fury / a mordant mind / who will ever be able / to save me from myself?

Or: Poetry / like fire you swallow paper / ashes of words into the blue sky!

The poems continued as a mirror of a state of being and got transformed in Pune with Osho, 13 years later: I’m afraid of you / emptiness of an unknown moment.

Or: Feeling myself new and clean / and still old and dirty.

And: Silence is my abode. / The wind my companion.

Or again: A waterfall of joy is jumping / over the obstacles of life.

Around the same time my life partner Teertha told me: “Suha, stop writing poems and allow your life to become poetry…” It took me almost two decades to understand, while reading my verses again, that the intuition and the grace of a moment had become deep experiences in life; to realize that, even not knowing what I was writing, the words themselves, by leaving deep tracks on my soul, transformed my relation with myself, other people and the world, filling me with awe: With unfurled sails / I sail without wind. / What I want I take. / What I give / smoulders with fire.

I discover, through writing, the beauty of my “touch of madness”: it is a great help in experiencing a “different” sensitivity, a multidimensional outlook that opens eyes, ears, heart and horizons: I am mad / with a different madness, / it’s not yours, but it’s also mine. / It’s a madness / that softly shines and joyfully flows out. / It doesn’t care about anything, / it doesn’t know why it is so happy / to feel at home. / Can’t say what it is.

Verses come after some group experiences, like this Hymn to the Drum born during the making of my shamanic drum: Resonance / of a magic sound / dressed in sacred leather / stitched with needle, / sweat and string. / As taut as my soul. / Beats of an ancient heart / rooted in emptiness / with a taste of clay / … and my belly smiled.

After a job interview: Two destinies barely touch each other while passing by, speechless, / in a silent glimpse of the eyes.

After a sleepless night: A candle is burning / the silence of the night.

During a train journey: Abundance: / a long second-class journey / with two seats to lie down in. Or while observing myself: My body feels too tight on me / like a narrow horizon.

Poetry is listening to myself and at the same time listening to others, because that’s what I find in the expressions of common people who are poets while unknowingly uttering poems. When a nun, for example, writes about her dog left in a farm near the monastery: “I would like to be buried with his leash.” When the same nun, on the stroke of her 70th birthday, says: “I am differently young.” When a farmer after ordering a hot chocolate in a bar says: “Today my stomach got a surprise.” When a rickshaw driver does not slow down because he has not seen the bumps in the road, and says: “The bumps didn’t reach my eyes!”

My favourite poetic expression is silence, when Words die away / on the heart’s lips / innocently throbbing with life. When I realize that Everything is already happening / when nothing comes up in an ordinary day!

To keep the right balance between myself and the word is a continuous task; it makes my ear musical without me being a musician, because the sound of a word next to another or their distance, the construction of the sounds created in this way give birth to meanings, to a sense, to a rhythm. Words can enter the energetic body of others, creating vibrational waves that call for silence. Isn’t this what Osho has always done with all of us?

Am I perhaps a poet? Or rather, am I the poetry of life that needs to express itself by using the language of the sensitivity that was given to me by life itself?

First published in Italian in Osho Times No. 227 – April 2016, translated by the author and edited by Marta Innocenti

Essay by Suha
Illustration by Padma – www.embraceart.com
More articles and poems by this author in Osho News