Month: June 2014

A Poet’s Fate

Pierre Mhanna1 Comment

‘I live in my own world. Not a soul has wandered through my land in a long, long time, longer than I can remember. And so, I have forgotten people and their faces, their language is now undecipherable for me, and their customs, alien. Thus I live, without a human touch, unable to reach into anyone and no one able to reach into me. Thus I live, a poet whose wine is drank by none, whose hymns are sang by the passing wind.

Thus read the paper found in a cabin deep in the woods. The readers were workers, their machines tearing through the woods like laborious ants and transforming it into another of mankind’s great cities, a testimony to the refined state which civilization achieved. Thus read the paper, and then was thrown onto the ground to become part of the city’s cemented foundations.

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I Miss You

Pierre Mhanna2 Comments

I miss you,
you whose heart
ever beat inside my own,
deeper into me
than the deepest dream,
more fragrant
than my best rose.

I miss you,
you whose breath
in my own I felt
ever since
my lips knew the meaning
of wind and air,
of inhale and exhale
and the infinity that spreads
at the still point where they mend.

I miss you,
you whose dreams
like stars were ever budding
in the dark firmament
on the underside of my skin,
colouring my blood
with the flame of your passion,
nurturing my tears
with your sweet lament
and my smile
with the joy of your soul.

I miss you endlessly,
even when I’m with you
I miss you,
I miss you and I miss you
and out of my passion
a heat so intense
shall melt the universe
into a star in your palms,
a flower with which
I’ll adorn your dark, long hair.

Free Verse # 215 (inviolable)

Pierre Mhanna3 Comments

Closed or open, you are all my eyes can see.

~

Desert harbor where a heart,
like a fruit in the sun,
shrivels from waiting.

~

With lightning for a needle
pierce into me, beloved,
and let my tears weep
into your sacred ground.

~

The vast language of the night enclosed between our merging bodies.

~

There are not enough flowers in the world to make a honey as fiery and abundant as your kiss.

~

…ah, but to kiss you, that is to have a beat in my heart.

~

This poem, a rose
Grown fervent in your dark hair,
Now bleeds burning wine.

~

I don’t care if what I write is beautiful or not—it is only meant to touch the hem of your dress; be worthy to gaze in your eyes’ purity.

~

Poetry is my way of dissimulating her presence.

~

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Inviolable
in the solitude of her soul
she stood,
the wind combed
through her hair,
the world like an endless poem
stretched below her feet.

~

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Open
I held my heart
like a cup before your sky;
it overflowed
and its waters filled the earth,
grew drunk
in the vision of your stars.

~

For me to burn I do not need to kiss you, or touch you, or think of you—you are the silence at my soul’s root, the emptiness that holds my being like a universe of stars.

Free Verse # 214 (a universe of poetry)

Pierre Mhanna4 Comments

Like my breaths, all my poems are stars in the unfolding algebra of her heart.

~

“Stain me with your passion,” she whispered, “let your liquid fire flow so deep my flesh becomes the vessel of your poetry.”

~

She wore night for a dress,
And the stars were poems
Adorning her infinite depth.

~

She will remain the poem I will never write, yet, for that reason, my most intimate poem.

~

Every night
gazing into the sky
among the stars I read
the longing which your eyes
left etched in a verse
meant to unfold
in the heart of me

~

Before the gateway of his heart she stood hesitant as though she were at the entrance of an endless forest brimming with endless mysteries, yet a vague scent called out to her, and a song her heart has been listening to since the day she was born.

~

I shut my sight from the world and sent it, like a star, through the brilliant depths of you.

~

We touched, and eons of separation between our fingers melted into an ocean which tide bore us to infinity.

~

Like the sea heaves a pearl onto the shore thus heaven yielded you into my arms, and eternity, upon our lips, was a song of remembrance and rebirth.

~

We burn
in each other’s flesh,
deeper still,
in each other’s thoughts,
and deeper,
in the silence between our heartbeats,
the still of our breaths.

~

My diary I kept in the folds of her skin—a star here, a tear there; here a flower, there a thorn; and in her heart a universe of poetry.

~

Not like fog does her breath blanket things, but, rather, like the mist of creation does it seep from their heart, from their very substance.

~

Welling up in my secret depths
this poem like a star
falls to her pillow,
all night long
whispers to her heart
a gentle light,
a dream…

~

Not knowing the seat of your heart I flutter, from star to star, yearningly asking, have you seen my love?

~

For the love of your eyes
I have wept my poems like dew
Into the dawn of their silence

~

I miss you,
and no word-cup
can contain my longing;
like fire through the seams of existence
it overflows,
melting the cosmos in its divine flow.

~

Silently my dewed whispers
Over your skin spread,
Soaking wet a garden
That now, in the rising sun,
Shines endless colors,
Words on love fed.

~

I feel you
as though you were a tree
which roots strike
into the unfathomable depths
of my wild, vibrant heart.

Free Verse # 213 (drunk on you)

Pierre Mhanna1 Comment

Whatever I am, I am a traveler
in the shadow of your sky,
distilling the light
of your dawn and dusk
into poetry’s ink,
into my own blood.

~

The flow of her hair –
a river breaking into an ocean
in the palms of his hands.

~

The contractions and expansions of time are governed by the movements of our lips—merging into each other, or aching in separation.

~

I am drunk on you, beloved, and all the words my mouth spills are not my own. And what of my heartbeats and breath? you ask—but you already know.

~

Time in her palms
became a turning circle,
a wreath of whirling stars
with which she crowns the sky.

~

Wine, from sipping at her lips, became a master in the art of desire.

Free Verse # 212 (your name on my lips)

Pierre Mhanna1 Comment

Your name
A flower on my lips
Every dawn sighing
The sweetest poetry.

~

A snowflake
in your breath thawing;
a dewdrop
soaked into your skin;
a flower
from your lips sighing;
then silence,
the flow from your eyes.

~

I wanted to be alone but you touched me and I no longer knew what lays outside of me.

~

Filled to overflow
with the waters of this love –
like an earth whose lips
for too long drank
from the sorrowing sky
then burst into bloom –
every nook and cleft
in the garden of my skin
has a song to sing,
a flower to lay
on the sacred altar
of your bubbling womb.

~

I loved my winters for they taught me what it is to burn and become flame.

~

Thus we sank
tangled in bliss,
our limbs coated,
soaked to the core
with poetry.

~

No longer a stranger
amid the trees of your forest,
like the fire-bird that flew back to the sun
I am one with the life that in you dwells.

~

Drunk
The flower of the night
From having sipped at your scent;
The sky
A whirlpool of stars
Heady with desire.

~

This poem
I lay upon the sky’s eyelids
as they close;
opening
the poem will be a flower
brimming with endless stars,
each a kiss eager to melt
in the wellsprings of your eyes.