Beating My Drum

With a Little Help from my Friends

I’m happy to say that Nasra Al Adawi at Living in Poetry has just posted an interview about my poetry as well as my upcoming prose book Original Faith: Becoming Our Truer Nature. Just prior to this, Victoria Bresee of The Polished Mirror happened to look over my site and complete the contact form to be notified when Original Faith is available so she can review it. Wouldn’t you know: by week's end, editors at The Atlantic and The New Yorker had also contacted me but I had to beg off, saying I had too many prior commitments.

Kidding aside, I’ve known both Nasra and Victoria for most of my “blogging life” – about two years – and have developed a very positive sense of each of them as persons. Major focuses in Nasra’s life and blogging are poetry; health issues and related charity work; and women’s issues. Victoria comes from a contemplative Christian orientation with major interests in social justice and women’s issues.

Thanks to each of you! And since poetry is such a major theme in Nasra’s writing and blogging, I thought I’d do a poem today. Guess it might as well be about me (but really it's about everyone) since I seem to be blowing my own horn here or at least beating my own drums:


Cutting Time

The shuddering roll vibrated in my fingers
Almost like a living thing; like bird’s wings struggling
To roil the air in nearly creamy swirls of sound. Into that near-liquid,
Flapping like mad, my rim shots splashed their slick remarks:
Off-handed cleverness surmounting rudiments
That tightened and loosened, gathered and released, into
Sudden tom-tom momentary rumba sounds.
And my two young arms dropped to the floor tom,
A swift triplet ending it on a bass kick. Then smash it,
Crash it, thrashing the flashing gold
Of every cymbal flaring its fascinating dish
Of overlapping reverberations like a chorus of monks
Sustaining fading Ohms, underpinned by the
Thick and solid thud of the bass drum that suddenly
Ripped forward on a low fly, my right ankle
Finding the full speed of my green adrenaline
Like a horse’s hooves greet earth,
Peppering the dance floor four to a swift measure:
All the while my hands flicking off hard pieces of silver sound
Under the colored lights,
Intimate with the dancing of strangers,
As I deftly cut and marked off slivers from our time;
Like nicks in any pair of splintering sticks
That I once held trembling like bird wings in my hands.

Paul Martin