Wandering Thought # 362

What the world corrupted, love will heal.

This consumer, work-centred world will do its best to discredit your belief in the primal force of love, discard your passion, and deafen your senses to this wondrous song that begins anew each day in your heart.

The first illusion always is the belief in the reality presented to you by your time and age. Most men spend their lives trapped within it, discarding as insane the few loners and solitary figures who dare step outside.

Even evil people need to tell themselves stories that make them look good in their own eyes.

I believe in the redeeming power of love and poetry.

Tanka # 228

Its petals
a mere husk;
as they fall
the poem becomes
living poetry.

Haiku # 756

Poor and alone
everything left
except this longing

Its petals fallen
the poem keeps
its hidden fragrance

In the tree’s shadow
the silence broken
by the croaking frogs

Wandering Thought # 361

We fall into addictive cycles as a way to escape pain, inner turmoil and anxiety. Instead of facing our underlying emotions — or because we are unable to recognize them — we take the easy way out and choose our drug of addiction which solidifies overtime into a pattern of behavior. The longer we persist the harder it becomes to break the cycle, the deeper we go into the labyrinth and no longer find our way out. It becomes our normal, part of our routine and coping mechanism, a need etched into our brain that drains our soul.

Tanka # 227

In all the places
where I imagined
I’d find you
I found only
my longing

Haiku # 755

De ton sourire
tu peux
éclairer une vie

With your smile
you can
brighten a heart

The wound didn’t vanish…
one spring it suddenly
bloomed full of life

In a birdsong
I’ll send you my poem…
first light of dawn

Times of war…
I open my book
and read poetry

Haibun # 7

High in the mountains, a long night with temperatures below freezing. The next morning, the winter sun warms the ground, and the frozen clumps of water under the soil begin to thaw, releasing a sound from under your feet, a cracking sound rising from all around in small waves.

Winter morning…
the sound of ice cracking
with the rising sun

Wandering Thought # 360

Closest to my heart is the woman who poeticizes her beauty.

A poet is a gardener of his soul.

Beauty is the bait; soul, its prey.

Only by way of beauty, may one reach the soul.

When I forget, the poem reminds me. The poem, the anchor of my desires and my most faithful friend. The poem knows me most intimately, understands me better than I understand myself. And that is why it is able to wait for me, patiently, like a fisherman with his net.

Haiku # 754

Mountain musings…
watching the cloud’s shadow
move across the field

Mountain quiet…
I listen to the wind
breezing through the trees

My Solitude

In my utter solitude
my soul lives on
in the words I write,
words not intended
for humans to read,
but only to echo the calls
of earth, sky and wind,
and persist in silence.

Irredeemably Lost

Before I knew it
the years passed by,
I had been beside myself
looking for something
I could not find.

And now my life feels
irredeemably lost,
opening onto a space
of emptiness and fog,
drowned in the wellspring
of solitude and silence,
burned into a prayer
for a long-forgotten god.

Haiku # 753

Le miracle d’amour…
avec mon cœur j’écris
ma vie en poèmes

The miracle of love…
with my heart I write
my life into poems

Spring morning…
waking up to the sound
of the pouring rain

The days are slow
yet swiftly it passes…
this life of leaves and wind

The words will find you…
a bird at dawn
singing after the rain

Past midnight…
the owl’s hoot
lulls me back to sleep

Tanka # 226

This burning world
that I keep loving,
a bird who sings
because he found
dawn in his heart.

Tanka # 225

All the lonely nights
suddenly come to light,
their bright flame
burning in my heart
burning with your name.

Nocturnal Rain

The nocturnal rain
covered the city’s clamour
with a soft veil;
an owl’s call came
like a bell ringing
somewhere in the deep,
awakening the heart
to a profound mystery.

Haiku # 752

The life of a poet…
a birdsong fading
in autumn mist

…حياةُ الشاعر
أُغنيةُ عُصفورٍ تعبُرْ
ضبابِ الخريف

Through the soft rain
a birdsong reaches
my bed at dawn

City night…
an owl hoots
as it starts to rain

Lessons From Poetry

What has poetry taught me?
To open my heart
and let it embrace the world
no matter how it hurts,
to sink into my being
and live every moment in full,
to listen to the intimate language
of things and their hidden lives,
to be joyful in a transient world
and celebrate each leaf of autumn
even as it falls,
to become light in a world of heaviness
and flow like a river
through the ocean of life,
to unlock within me
the boundless source of passion
and touch a woman’s body
as though it’s the hidden sanctum
in the Word of God.

Lost Book

The book I thought I had lost
returned to me by the grace
of a stranger’s hand —
or was it the wind
who whirled it like a leaf
and placed it, gently,
by my doorstep,
in a place she knew
I would find.

Wandering Thought # 359

If you decide to be a poet, you can no longer seek validation from your surroundings, society, and even family and friends. Your love for poetry must exceed the pressure of the normal life exerted upon you, so much that you are willing to embrace solitude without feeling like you are sacrificing anything of value, without becoming alienated in your being. Poetry must, ultimately, be a joy, through which you rediscover the simplicity of life and its true depth. You will be alone, but you will find company with the elements of nature, and in your heart you will live the myth no one believes in, no one stands as witness for. You will be closer to the secret of life, though, your tragedy, is that you will have no one to communicate it to; no one except the fellow mystics and poets with whom you communicate across ages and times. There, will be your true company, there, your true belonging. Condemned to go through life as immaterial a wisp of smoke in the eyes of others, you who have universes burning within you. Yet joy will save you. Joy and a deep faith in poetry.

Wandering Thought # 358

Beauty may be random, may be given unjustly to some regardless of their merit — but grace isn’t. Beauty, without grace, is but a plastic, a form without substance, distasteful and repulsive. True beauty is the grace that emanates from the soul, in which aura the body is cloaked.