Rearranged Life

 this beach of pebbles

after the wave

my life rearranged

Gregory Piko (Australia)

I believe the emphasis falls on this — this beach of pebbles. The one I'm contemplating and evoking now. The one revealing something unexpected and fascinating. The one I’m offering you, too, as a source of admiration and reflection.

Colloquial language knows how to say, elliptically and succinctly, only what needs to be said. It doesn’t burden the text with details or descriptive adjectives. This is enough, and at the same time, deeply expressive — it draws you in, invites you to see, to feel, and to understand the moment.

The text continues just as laconically and, in the end, slips — more than suggestively — from what the wave actually does (shuffles the pebbles and leaves them in a new, different arrangement) to a completely improbable effect: it (re)orders the poet’s life (and the reader’s, if they’re open to the same revelation). Through this simple substitution — the image of constantly shifting stones moved by the waves for the image of human life — what we witness becomes a parable, and the text takes on the aesthetic value of a haiku.

The revelation, in human terms, is actually an acceptance under the sway of an image that becomes a vision. There is no disorder — every change under the constant assault of life’s waves is simply a new, unexpected, and unmatched order. This wave is just the moment when someone understood and made peace with fate. The pebbles had known this all along. They had always been telling him so — but in vain.

The poem tells us this without insistence. It simply gives us something to ponder. It gently draws our attention to the fact that this has already happened — to someone.

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The allegory is clear: we speak of pebbles, and they quietly speak to us — about ourselves.

(Comment by Corneliu Traian Atanasiu)