I was invited to write this poem for inclusion in the Burr Print & Purpose print portfolio curated by Eunice Geustyn and Melvyn Minnaar for AVA in 2016. The theme of the portfolio was ‘burr’.
A burr is a rough edge left on an object by the action of a tool and is familiar to printmakers, but not only them.
The word has several other meanings too. It is also the rock used in millstones. A prickly seed case or flower head that sticks to clothes or animal fur. It is a pattern of swirls in dense wood. It is a whirring sound. It is a weal, which is a raised part of the skin that has responded to an injury. And it is the coronet of a deer’s antler, that part that attaches the antler to the head, or from which the antler sprouts. Coronet, in turn, is another word for crown.
This avalanche of meaning came together to become a poem about creation, regeneration and wisdom (the imagined old woman the speaker of the poem is in conversation with). I had a strong sense of the head as a place of power (carrying antlers or crowns) while also being a locus of torture to the self (the weight of it and what it must carry, the injuries it inflicts on ourselves through destructive thoughts, and its physical aches).
I imagined an invisible halo of light around every human head as a sign of their own creativity, which I think of as divine, and how all ache can be healed through the arts.
‘Then why’ appeared in Navigate (Modjaji, 2017)
Then why