TENNOS

Whiling away the hours...

Occasionally I find myself awake in the middle of the night, unable to escape back into sleep. One of my stratagems for diving into unconsciousness again is to try mentally to compose a few lines of a poem, or continue putting together words that will shunt a work-in-progress out of its siding and get it back on the rails that it left when I abandoned it. This seldom results in a successful poem. But usually my mind fades gratefully back into sleep.

The other night I surfaced in the dark at 2:30am with a line running through my head that I couldn’t erase, a written line, not a spoken one. At 3 am I gave in. Not waking Dónall, I began to write the poem in long-hand, the way I always write a first draft. And I found I had to write it with each word spelt backwards.

The first line was: ‘Water cannot flow uphill’.

Prosaic enough. But then I wrote:

Retaw tonnac wolf llipu

And then I realised that that I could write the poem that line belonged to, as long as I continued in the same language, the same code. By 5am I had completed the first draft of ‘Tennos’.

Dónall was not impressed when I read ‘Tennos’ to him after breakfast, but allowed that in translation to English it might be worth sharing. I went on drafting both my original, ‘Tennos’ and my translation, ‘Sonnet’ simultaneously. My next step is to practise reading ‘Tennos’ fluently, of course.

Here are the final versions of both poems:

TENNOS

Retaw tonnac wolf llihpu
ron nac emit nur desrever, I wonk.
Lla tsum ekat eht drawrof etuor
dial nwod yb etaf ni eht tsrif
stnemom fo siht esrevinu.
Rof deppart ew era litnu eht dne
sekatrevo ruo elttil wiev
fo noitaeredna stes su eerf ta tsal.

Tub sdrow yam esool a deirrow dnim
fia teop sesoohc ot esare
drah gninaem dna niater
ylelos cisum, ylelos dnuos, sa ereh.

Won wols I etirw ym s’tennos drawkcab sdrow
no gninrut efil dnuora, gninnur retaw pu a llih.

***
SONNET

Water cannot flow uphill
nor can time run reversed, I know.
All must take the forward route
laid down by fate in the first
moments of this universe.
For trapped we are until the end
overtakes our little view
of creation and sets us free at last.

But words may loose a worried mind
if a poet chooses to erase
hard meaning and retain
solely music, solely sound, as here.

Now slow I write my sonnet’s backward words 
on turning life around, running water up a hill.

It was only after finishing the poems that I realised that there’s a whole YouTube /TikTok genre of backwards singing. I didn’t enjoy any of the clips I found on YouTube (the English words were not clear enough and the AI subtitles that had been added made nonsense of the English words too.). Watch this space for my attempt to read ‘Tennot’ to an a normal, forward-orientated audience in a public setting!

I suspect that this will be my one and only experiment in backwards writing, you won’t be surprised to hear.