Bonsai by edith tiempo3/16/2024 Then there came the question in the next line that said, “All that I love?” The interrogative statement was posed for self-examination which was, in the next stanza, assured with the lines “Why, yes but for the moment-/ And for all time, both.” The two lines are an oxymoron for love can be both temporal and eternal. Memory stays with a person forever but it is often unreliable which is why there is a need to simplify love if it has become overwhelming so that it is easy to handle and quick to retrieve the memories from the labyrinths of the mind. In the first stanza, Bonsai describes everything one loves as something that could be folded into the smallest size so that one could “keep in a box/ Or a slit in a hollow post/ Or in my shoe.” The idea is to turn one large concept such as love into something that “folds and keeps easy” so that one’s memory will not be cluttered. In this work of literature, love is the abstract idea. The poem is an example of a work that is objective-correlative wherein the ideas depicted are abstract. This is the destructive nature of love which is why the award-winning poet Edith Tiempo, in her poem Bonsai, scaled down love into a “cupped hand size.” And in the hands of people who are unable to control it, love overwhelms the person. When love is great, when love is profound, it becomes more difficult to control.
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