The Blue Rabbit by Joyce Job

The BLUE Rabbit by Joyce Job

A world of emotions, thoughts to reflect upon, and emotions and feelings.

Haven’t we all fancied colouring our worlds a little bit different, like those toddlers who never felt any discomfort in expressing themselves through all the ways. The Blue rabbit is one such poem. A little girl named Keli with all the joy in the world, bursts in to sit next to the author. She shows us what it is like to colour the world with one’s own choice. She paints the rabbit in her sketchbook with a blue crayon. The author had brilliantly chosen the wording here,

It’s a rabbit that needs colours now;

wonder if she knows what colour they come in,

‘coz she picks a little blue crayon swiftly

and starts scraping it all over the shocked rabbit.

The choice to make the rabbit shocked is just how we might be shocked when we make our own choices. 

PEOPLE

The section “people” consists of 18 poems, each describing something different, yet universal. Some things are variably hidden in mankind. Two Men is one such poem. You can see two men who live in their own world. They belong to nobody, as they didn’t matter to anyone outside or anyone outside didn’t matter to them. 

Half Lives is one of the strongest poems in the book. The essence of human existence is saturated into a single declaration

“Half-buried?” I asked him.

“No, he Replied. “Half Alive.”

Can anything burn brighter than the desire for life?

We come across people who we can just see, who we think we can see, and then there are people who we can just feel, through their words, their actions, or being just there as a gentle presence. The author of The Blue Rabbit, Joyce Job is one such person. Her poems at first feel like a gentle breeze, and when you feel the aroma and stench, when you feel the strength and the helplessness, when you feel the aloof nature and craving to be in this world… you know you’ve chosen a book full of poems to be felt all along.

You can really find yourself, some pieces of your heart, a little bit of those late-night thoughts when you cried, laughed, and even dreaded your existence. The themes revolve around People, Love & Search. And you will find yourself with everyday struggles, the omnipotent nature of love its strengths and weaknesses, the search for an inner self, the silence, and the madness. Or those exhilarating musings, the fear…!!!

LOVE

Love is not all about roses and kisses sometimes it’s about heartbreak, it’s about questing the existence of oneself. The poems in this section are adorned with simplicity and elegance. When the poet saw ‘worlds more beautiful in somebody’s insanely deserted eyes’ (Eyes), it sure does evoke an image of a pair of beautiful eyes. And the hard acceptance that the distances will never disappear (Love Laws).  

Dustbin is another poem that brings back a gush of memories, a school crush, and the fight to let go of something that’s etched so deep in the heart, though years never faded it to any extent. Have you ever been stabbed by the one person you thought would heal you, so magically? And at last,

“i became an abstraction. He just a metaphor”. (The Muse).

 The world does heal the pain in unexpected ways or at least makes you think that’s what you need. 

Have you ever thought staring at something may be staring into your own soul? The one you wished would be with us forever but, now that person is just to be cleansed off your system. And poet resorts herself to a poem or two, or even a song in the hopes of getting rid of those memories. Even when you want to walk away, the other half of your mind keeps asking you to take a look back. (I keep staring).

Parted is one such poem in which you can find the deepest thoughts one could put into remembering someone. A friend, an enemy perhaps, the one bond that no tides of time or age could dampen. The memoirs still linger. In the depths of her poems, we could really feel the kintsugi method (Kintsugi is the process of repairing ceramics traditionally with lacquer and gold, leaving a gold seam where the cracks were). Something as raw as fresh wounds mended with priceless poetic sensibility.

Memories exist only to make us believe we have lived a life or are living a life. Joyce has portrayed the same through MEMORIES. And she does emphasize the fact that “We have changed beyond recognition.” Well, that’s some of us go through that helpless feeling of moments becoming memories. Another poem, I KEEP STARING is the one where we can see a bond that was lost, but the one that keeps hurting. As she stares at her books, she could see the tallest one the other bought her. The memories make her wonder if she should get past the whole memory or not. The dilemma is presented in such a way that we might remember something or someone from our own life.

The beauty of symbolism in Joyce’s words is so charming. Though you could find it in most of the poems, let’s take a look at BROKEN ART.

 “let’s go on with a rainbow thrown

  from our tear prisms,

  our broken hearts held high

  like a flag of glory

  our scars are thrown at a canvas

  like a piece of art.”

If not a prism through which we split the white of agony into colours of memories what do our tears mean?

BROKEN WINGS and TRACE OF YOU are those poems that resemble haiku. The lines from both poems though short are of depth, will, and nostalgia. 

SEARCH

This section houses Joyce’s most iconic poems about the very nature of search. The poems are mostly self-reflection, pondering over human existence and its never-ending search for the meanings, or the answers.

This section starts with the poem HER. This poem just draws a world of extremes that resides within a girl, maybe the author herself, but could be any one of you. An amalgam of loner and hyper, a dichotomy of two nativities, two homes, two dialects, and whatnot? The dilemma of logic and emotions when it comes face-to-face. Haven’t we felt we are two broken halves in one? If so, HER is not a poem to miss. You can see how the author herself embraced her inner self of stark contrasts to embrace life and its challenges. The ending says,

 “She exists is the only reason

    I exist.”, isn’t this the sole reason some of us still haven’t ceased to exist? Just as the author opens a space for us to reevaluate the best of our own existence there is a single question that we ought to ask ourselves before questioning our own identifying features. Just how your own extremities tend to fulfill your own identity, just like the “two broken halves in one”.

One could feel the author’s thoughts in ‘What do I write.’

“A writer living inside her catacombs

never leaving her cocoons.”

Though she says she doesn’t leave her cocoons, she weaves the best of poems. We could see her search to make something more than her, an original one. She believes in the strength of being different. ‘Who puts words in my mouth’, can be read as the continuation of ‘What do I write’ though in a different sense. She asks herself who, and what makes her write.

‘Greatest fear’ is one poem that opens up the inner conflict one has to go through. The writer keeps thinking “I’m scared of me.” But would we ever want to be anything other than ourselves? And the fear that we might fall again.

Two Lives is a poem where an engineer meets the poet. A lost writer who tries to live up in the world of codes that is written with the same 26 alphabets that are used to create the world of poetry. To live dual lives. ‘The Denied Legacy’ is the thought of what we do leave after all the thousand seeds in our hearts.

‘In Madness’ is one of the contemplative poems. Or the longing for poetry. Because in madness, do we find what we need the most? As we are the best at our madness. Leaving is one such poem that we all have wished for… The wish to have a room where no one would ask us to clear out. But at the same time, we know life may not be always what we desire. And of course, we do leave at dawn.

‘New year wish’ is a simple poem that reminisces about the night of the new year. The moments that passed, the memories that linger. The last poem in the collection, “Nature self” is one of the poems that revolve around the common theme of nature. Though the theme is one of the most commonly written, Joyce left a touch of her soothing words in it. 

Can we take rain home 

and call it family? 

And the poem ends with her thought of making this world a better place to live. The liveliest and broken images of nature are woven along the words that make this poem linger a bit long in our hearts.

The time we spent in ‘The Blue Rabbit’ by Joyce Job is something that we won’t regret investing in. Because the beauty of words along with the intertwined emotions are to be experienced in such a way that one loses the sense of time and reality. She opens a world of multiple realities and chances to reflect upon them. She did a great job protecting the wordplay from unnecessary ornation. It could be a defining and inspiring act of conviction, to believe in what one holds true to one’s beliefs. As per the theme, most of the poems felt like the author’s personal experiences which of course adds to the depth. And to be honest, the way to improve is just to beat her own level of excellence that she created through her collection ” The Blue Rabbit.”

Follow her at https://liriomarchito.wordpress.com/ .