COMMON GROUND
Do you think your poems belong to a separate, inner world, removed from your working life?
Shari Daya is a Cape Town-based poet and geographer who uses her academic research and expertise as raw material for her deeply engaging poems. Her debut collection, Land / Lines, was published by Karavan Press in 2024. In it, she seamlessly moves between the aerial, bird’s eye view of a researcher and deep amazement in the face of the “thrill of hot, soft, quiet lives.” This month she shared two beautiful fragments from ‘Common Ground’, one of the most arresting poems from this collection, with The AVBOB Poetry Project. The poem describes a morning trip to see mushrooms and frogs in a common area not far from her home.
Read the fragments she shared and discover how exciting it can be when one’s areas of expertise find their way into the poems one is writing. The first fragment reads:
… The little lids, lifted to reveal something of the magic of the forest’s
understory, should have a name, too. You could Google it. You could type,
“the bit of earth that remains on top of a mushroom post-puhpowee”. The
engine will respond, “your search did not match any documents.”
Notice that Daya writes in the third person here, as if looking at herself from a slight distance. She would like to look up the name for the lid of a mushroom, as any curious researcher would. She has already told us that “puhpowee” is a Native American word referring to “the force that / causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” In other words, this is a foreign word she has learned from another writer and researcher. She knows, however, that Google will not have answers to such a question. She is in the presence of something she cannot study, but only experience.
The second fragment, starting only a few lines later, reads:
In the pine-scented gloom, the mushrooms watch with equanimity
from under their hats, and today, you watch the mushrooms watching the
mammals. Your walk is much slower than planned, because you keep
stopping to greet more of these silent, wild creatures. If you watched long
enough, you would see, or hear, the growth. You would feel the vibrations as
these organisms break the skin of the earth. Repeatedly, as you crouch for a
better view, you are less alone in the scrap of forest than you imagined.
By the time the reader reaches this second fragment, Daya has become almost entirely immersed in the landscape through which she is travelling. She feels the mushrooms returning her gaze, watching her. Far from being passive objects of her study, they have become “silent, wild creatures” that have to be greeted and acknowledged.
However, notice that she does not collapse the boundary between herself and the mushrooms completely. They are still “organisms” that can “break the skin of the earth” in a way that is impossible for human beings. But her experience of them is changing her, forcing her to slow down and realise that she is less alone than she imagined. She is not looking at them in the spirit of a neutral observer sharing knowledge but as a human being who is open to new, potentially transformative experiences. As a result, the attentive reader is drawn into the adventure, eager to learn and experience with her.
In the next few days, write a poem exploring something about which you care and know more than most people. See if you can turn your enthusiasm into something exciting and accessible.
The annual AVBOB Poetry Competition closed on 30 November 2025 and reopens on 1 August 2026. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za and register to enter.