Rani Drew: One Poem

Rani Drew

Rani Drew is a playwright, poet and short story writer. She has been published in poetry and fiction magazines in Canada, US, UK and India, and in translation in Romanian and Hungarian journals. She has written thirty stage and radio plays, and has produced fifteen of them in the U.K, China and Hungary.

Her first collection of poems Celestial Seductions came out in 2001, followed by two collections of stories, Around the World in Twelve Stories (2002) & Stories of All Ages.(2005). Asian Galaxy (Drama, 2005) was published in a bilingual (Chinese & English) edition. Medea & Other Poems (2006) is her second collection of poetry.

Duendeor Ananda?
(for Garcia Lorca)

The man sits on the edge of the chair,
head down, eyes shut, hands still.

The flamenco guitar strums forlornly.
The head lifts, the voice rises straight

upwards, sharp as a sword, the cry shreds
the air to pieces.

I watch the gitano battling with his Duende,
journeying deep into soul’s suffering.

This, Lorca, is art to you, the passion for death,
a scar essential to healing.

Anguish perfects art. A courtship with death,
the humming bird suspended in mid air,

fluttering for yet another breath of the scent.
Never enough, your Duende.

I see another man. He sits on the floor, his
legs crossed to make a still posture. The even

sounds of the instrument create a backdrop,
the voice begins to probe the cosmic depths.

There are no mysteries here, only labyrinths
of creation, of the meaning of life,

not anguish for extinction. This is Ananda, Lorca,
art of another sort, a dissolution with the divine.