Haiku # 722

Autumn begins…
lying in the grass I guess
the shape of the clouds

لوجودها في حياتي
رائحة الأرض العطشى
بعد مطر الخريف

للذكريات حفيف
أنصت إليها وأنا أتأمّل
تساقط أوراق الخريف

You speak my heart better
than all their words…
moon in the sky

Looking at her hurts…
so much love
I can not speak

First days of autumn…
writing poetry
to the light of the moon

My heart melts
with infinite softness
as I look at you

Though apart
between us a thread
weaved by the moon

Autumn begins
and my heart wanders
in dreams of endless white

Summer evening
what the stars whisper
I hear in my heart

‏هذا الشعر
ضوءُ شمعةٍ بهِ أتلمَّس
تفاصيلَ وجهكِ

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Haiku # 719

‏سبعُ سنينٍ يا أُختي
ما زِلتُ أبكي كلما
رأَيتُكِ في حُلُمي

‏حُبُْها في قلبي
برعمٍ أبيض نضِر
مكسوٍ بحبيبات الندى

‏قصيدة الهايكو
وحدها تنصت
إلى سكونِ روحي

‏خفيفٌ كالغيم مرورَكِ
لكنَّهُ يجعَلَني أَحلُم
بما وراءَ الجبال

Wandering Thought # 79

We are creating for ourselves a world in which it is impossible to live; and even if life was still physically possible, it would be undesirable.

~ ~ ~

Once it is over we’ll discover it — modernity was a big lie. Modernity — an incredibly rich soil that nonetheless did not allow the growth of anything great.

~ ~ ~

Thirty six; the year I discovered the truth about myself.

Wandering Thought # 57

There is a hierarchy to love — those who lose their heads stand highest.

Wandering Thought # 54

Like a tight bud I closed in upon myself, but that was only the outward appearance of it; in truth it was an inward motion, a closing in upon the self that is an opening up of an inward world, the inward world, the world of the soul; and the most precious thing this gave me? (and this I call poetry, the self-expressive, the inwardly reflexive) — the ability to withstand my solitude so I could deepen myself and give myself back to the world through my heart and from the depth of my soul.

Metaphor for humanity

A man who is in a gravely ill condition refuses to go see a doctor despite the many advises he is given. Days go on and his illness grows worse until, at last, he falls out of consciousness and an ambulance is called in to rush him to the hospital. If he survives the damage he suffered will not be reversible, and he will be forced to live on in a diminished existence.

Man, the rational animal, will not do the one rational thing that ensures his future survival, the survival of humanity. Could it be that, after all, man is irrational? Rationality — if we believe his claim, that he is rational — has been a tool at work against his survival — rationality as his greatest stupidity; its progress and advancement leading to his extinction.

Man, the animal with no control over his impulses and will, ultimately wills his own end.

Wandering Thought # 50

The invention of aviation was not a utilitarian invention. Reading through its history one realizes that its root and outgrowth came the human imagination, from an irrational fixation on the reveries where man saw himself flying, felt himself in flight, and so ached to achieve flying that from the profundity of a love that persisted through millennia he was finally able to materialize his dream.

 

In the end, much of our modern inventions with which we pride ourselves owe themselves to this — poetry and witchcraft, the ability to imagine new things, impossible things. For all his rationality, man, more than he knows, will always be close to the poet’s heart — his passions, which are inescapable, will make sure of this.

Wandering Thought # 49

Is the tree less surrendered to love for rising towards the sky and asserting itself, its own height and elevation? Is it less in unity and oneness for affirming itself, its own identity and uniqueness? For wanting to rise higher than its surroundings? For wanting to look down on its surroundings, and high towards the sky? Is it not a betrayal of its duty to its oneness if it refuses to assert its own difference, its own necessarily partial view of the sky towards which it rises? — Replace the tree with man and you will find much of modern spirituality vanishing with a whiff of bad breath, vanishing to reveal itself as a sewer, and one giving discharge to…

Tanka # 103

Desire stirs
and I am writing again,
pen dipped in the dew
of the pond
in her womb.

~

In life’s wax and wane
my poem is a fire moon
blossoming steady
in the sea
of her eyes

Wandering Thought # 47

Whatever men insisted women should be or are feminism insisted that women should be its opposite, or that the power relation should be inverted so as women gain the upper hand — this reactive stance as much as it is lauded and needed (we’ve been waiting for it for millennia) will not take us beyond the dynamics of the power relation, the dreadful either/or so entrenched in the breast of culture and the shaping of men and women. This reaction should, instead, grasp itself differently, channel its energy differently — rather than being a reaction it should affirm itself, it should be an affirmation and an affirmative act — women are women irrespective of men and the will and desires of men; woman is woman not as an act that is directed against men, but as an affirmative act of herself and her own being, her own life, aspirations, and embodiment in the world — a creative act and a first act. That is essential, since only this will suspend the opposition struggle of men and women and allow each to find itself entrenched in the other — the woman in man, and the man in woman, and their struggle together in the creation of a new culture that goes beyond the limitations of the old. This will truly be the blow that dismantles the gender dynamics that have governed culture since millennia, giving men and women the space needed to discover themselves and each other anew and in a new light. The relation no longer power-centered, its destructive edge will be replaced by a more supportive and mutually understanding spirit that refuses to slide back into the old modes of relating even when conflicts and tensions arise. What will it look like, this culture? What will its men and women be? — it and they are flourishing right under our eyes, they are coming and will come at a quicker pace in the coming decades. The love-flower that daring spirits dreamed a thousand years ago — we are the witnesses of its coming of age.

Wandering Thought # 46

Though it often hides itself behind a veil of humanism, it is the mark of a tortured soul, this need to identify with every suffering and struggling cause. Through this identification it prolongs its own torture, finding new means to discharge its weariness; and where new causes cannot be found new causes must be invented, lashes of evil imagined here and there, imagined villains that must be vanquished. The suffering soul only betrays itself with the vehemency with which it wishes to expunge all suffering.

Wandering Thought # 42

The power play in sex is one of the most difficult things I had to come to term with. This being said, to make a fetish of the power play, to make it the focal point of the relationship is to miss out on the spiritually interpenetrating aspects that truly form the throbbing core of why two people are together, and what makes them expand and grow together into that which is held above them. The power play is a form of expression, this character or that being suited to this spectrum or that, this essence or that. On its own it does not supersede or form the essence and budding center of the connectivity.

Free Verse # 377 (gypsy way, rooted in love)

At the entrance
of the poem
I wait for you,
in my hand a vow
weaved
with the light of the moon.

~

O heart
what do I do with you?
I cast you
you come back,
I hold you
you turn away,
I wait for you
you fail to come,
O heart
always on the run.

~

In the morning
your voice comes to me
and I shake like a leaf
caught in the wind

~

A dash of salt and honey; a handful of poetry.

~

Always
a little ink in my blood
to paint the shadows
of the burning flowers

~

Woman brave enough to meet me
In the throbbing heart of poetry

~

This poetry,
a chalice we raise
and pour
over the world…
the moon at dawn.

~

Without a word uttered
our poems
conversed all night
in the light
of the stars and moon

~

The swift step
of your shadow
moving across my poem
blooming at dawn

~

I gaze into her face
and my eyes drift,
a bird flying
through a sea of fog,
and this flight
becomes my journey,
this journey becomes home.

~

What does it take
to make the poem dance?
A smile from her lips,
A gaze from her eyes.

~

Even after I die
some things will never change,
stars will shine,
waves will roll,
and my breath will seek yours
in the infinity of the sky.

~

Take me with you
on a gypsy kind of road,
from poem to poem
a life of wandering,
in our bag
the moon and stars,
and a kiss shared
like bread like wine,
a kiss shared
for the rest of our days.

~

Will you come? –
I am no longer sure;
like a poem standing
in its own grave,
all around me grows
the silence of the sky.

~

Softly softly
sway inside of me,
this gentle rub
the sigh of poetry.

Wandering Thought # 39

It takes more to giving than giving in to the initial impulse of pity. If a man is hungry, instead of giving him food, teach him how to farm, or how to fend for himself. That will be more difficult to achieve than the easy gesture of giving him something of which you have in excess, and which aim is ultimately your own self-indulgence, indulging your own pity. And the opposite to this is true as well: instead of going the hard way, of learning how to fend for himself and controlling his future, a hungry or poor man is wont to stir the imagination and conscience of another into giving him what he needs.

Wandering Thought # 38

Man is good not because of a primordial quality, something which in him exists in a natural state apart from society, but because the possibility of being good exists for him in his future, because, molded the right way, he can become so in his future. So it is a future seed with a retroactive force that acquires of him the full weight of his soul to actually become, and not something lurking in his past which requires of him to passively submit and surrender. So it is with love; love, which demands of him not to unlearn everything as the modern nihilists would like us believe, unlearn everything and revert back to a pure and unsoiled state, but to learn and educate himself so much as to become able to love. Goodness and love are romanticized by those who lack them most, and those who, pierce a little into their soul, you’d find them to be infested with maliciousness and hate.

Wandering Thought # 37

A friend is someone who brings us back to ourselves whenever we drift, sometimes through a kind word, at times with a hard gesture. A friend remains close to us even when we think they’re far, that our pain and ache are incommunicable, even when we think we are abandoned by the world, left to meet the weight of everything on our own. A friend is someone who knows how to wait, when and how to administer the shot.

Hafez – Become A Lover

Don’t tell the mysteries of drunkenness and love
To a pedant. Let him pass away on his own,
With his ignorance and self-centerdness still inside.

If you feel weak, feeble, and powerless, well,
So does the breeze. Being sick on the Path is a hundred
Times better than a healthy mind in a healthy body.

As long as you see yourself as learned and intellectual,
You’ll lodge with the idiots; moreover, if you
Can stop seeing yourself at all, you will be free.

If you are living in your dear one’s castle, don’t even think
About the heavens above; because if you do
You’ll drop like a stone to the filth-covered street.

Become a lover; if you don’t, one day the affairs of the world
Will come to an end, and you’ll never have had even
one glimpse of the purpose of the workings of space and time.

On the spiritual road, being uncooked and raw
Is a mark of unbelief; it’s best to move along the path
Of fortune with nimbleness and springy knees.

In a nook safe from blame, how can we stay
Secluded when your dark eye reminds us
Always of the joy and mysteries of drunkenness?

Long ago I had a premonition of these riots
That have now occurred, when with a proud turn
Of the head you refused to sit quietly with us.

Although the thorn hurts your spirit, the rose asks pardon
For this wound; the sourness of wine is more easily tolerated
When one remembers the sweet flavor of drunkenness.

Hafez, your love is going to turn you over to the rough hand
Of the hurricane. Why did you imagine that, like a lightning
Bolt, you could free yourself from this storm?

— Hafez, The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door, translated by Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn

Arman Sigarchi – A gift to my father

The Agony for Beauty in a Poet’s Soul

To affirm beauty is to set a standard that, at the same time, affirms ugliness. To say that this woman is beautiful or desirable is to say that another, that that one is not. This “blatant injustice” that scratches our human dignity has been and to a great extent one of the prime movers of the drive towards equality. But what did then equality do?—it said that beauty, being culpable, is therefore none-existent and that all women, being human, are equal, the same. Although one cannot but bow to the nobility of this drive and aim, one cannot also suppress one’s drive for beauty and desire for long — one’s drive and desire for inequality — without turning hypocrite himself, plagued with a sort of resentment that turns the world ugly. One feels that this drive to equality acted as a channel for resentful and latent forces within society and the human soul — the resentful forces were there waiting for this opportunity or that to be allowed discharge. Of course, our eye should be subtle enough to disengage equality itself from this clumsy way to translate it into society and human consciousness, into the way the self relates to itself and others. Equality itself is blessed, and is something we waited for for millennia. By affirming equality in such a way a great favour is done to its enemies (and these affirmers of equality themselves are often deeply reactive souls who, in different circumstances, will turn fascists in the blink of an eye). The injustice of setting standards and affirming beauty as a way to channel one’s desires and energies needs not impinge our moral and humane sensibilities. The notion of difference together with the hierarchy it raises is not necessarily one that dehumanises that from which it is different. One can still relate humanely and deeply to all while affirming the difference of one’s taste and predilections. That we might have erred so far from this rather simple realisation and crystallisation of the drive for equality can only be due to the fact that there are other reactive forces at work in the strata of our soul, forces that, feeling the break with the old morality and mode of living, took to the front of the stage and made us suffer and struggle. This suffering and struggling are the throes of birth of the new human being that has come, that is coming. Do you have eyes and souls refined enough to see him/her?

أحمد حويلي – رسل البيادر