In the age of feminism it almost instills in us a sense of guilt to say that a woman is feminine and beautiful.
Tag: beauty
Free Verse # 434 (she is all the lights)
In your touch
I make transactions
with beauty,
selling each moment
for a veil of your light,
feeling the white
of your perception
shine from my soul.
~
My poetry,
its endless brushstrokes
paint the features
of my face;
look at it,
it has no eyes
but only a silence
with which to gaze
upon the world.
~
When I write
I imagine my fingers
touching her face
the way the moth hovers
around the candle-light,
I feel my hands
dipped in her skin
like oars rowing
in a starlit sea of poetry.
~
Looking at her
the poem tries
with burnings fingers
to describe her beauty,
but then it falls down,
speechless.
~
She is all the lights the city needs.
~
My heart
I feel it connected to yours
by a hidden string,
like night to the day,
like the sky to the earth
and to the rolling sea of stars.
Wandering Thought # 73
One of the greatest taboos of modern feminism is on beauty; that a woman is beautiful, that a woman is perceived by a man as beautiful — modern feminism wants equality here, and by equality is meant sameness, and the infliction of guilt into the soul of the one who perceives beauty.
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?
Haiku # 133
Oiseau blessé…
de la fissure du ciel
les rayons de l’aube
A Strong Person
A strong person doesn’t mind being weak. She’d rather show her weakness than hide behind a veil of strength. She’d rather acknowledge the mess she were for a certain period or in a certain situation than surrender to the pretense of control. Control — she’s not over-anxious to control because she’s already unfolding, through good and bad, becoming who she is. A strong person is not afraid of the things that wound her and refuses to grow a hard skin and heart for their sake. She’s never afraid of showing her true face, even if it happens to be “ugly” — for therein is true beauty and the quest for beauty. A strong person is not ashamed of who and what she is.
Letter, August 23, 2015
I photograph you like a painter brings a landscape to a slow fervency in his mind, like a poet slowly accumulates a poem’s water in the well of his heart. I photograph you not into a still image, but into an ever shifting sea of shadows and light, each peeled wave revealing a greater depth, and so unto eternity. I photograph you, gazing at you, undressing you, slowly drinking you like wine, but each falling veil dresses you with a thousand beating wings of light, and each inebriating layer thrusts me higher into the clarity of your eyes. I photograph you, but how can an infinite being be contained in a painting, tune, or poem? I photograph you, but you cannot be contained, and so you overflow, through me, through creation entire, even from inside the rays of light. And so your beauty frees me as it enslaves me, teaching me the meaning of surrender, the ability to receive your light, but also daring me to penetrate you deeper, and deeper, until I become a mariner on the high seas of your tides.
Free Verse # 301 (this wordless silence)
From flower to flower
I kept fluttering
following the trail
of your fragrance
until I realized
that you are the presence
submerging my whole
~
We kissed,
this poem
amid our lips humming
a bee inside a flower
gathering honey
in the honeycomb of our heart.
~
A heart more open
Than the sky at dawn;
This wordless silence
Flowing white with love.
~
I meet her…
the explosion of silence
in the mouth of dawn
~
Brushstrokes of silence…
the waters of dawn
welling from a touch
~
At dawn I woke
my ear on the pillow,
each echo of my heart
sighing your name.
~
Firefly madness…
night in her hair
a sea of stars
~
Cupping her hair…
a nocturnal waterfall
flooding with stars
~
Sifting the air
for a ribbon
of her breath
~
Tangy erotica…
his thirsty mouth,
her fervent wine
Senryu # 121
Over her face
the sky of dawn
a shivering blue veil
What does it mean when I say that ‘Over her face she held dawn like a shivering blue veil’? It means that her face is too pure to be touched, reach for it and it will fade. Only by growing quiet and still, by growing inwardly receptive to the light shining from within her will her face begin revealing itself to you, caressing your heart and soul in endless white waves, rippling your shore into an ever changing poem, one that mirrors and expresses the hidden light eternally pouring through the seams of her veil. The more you contemplate the simple magnificence she reveals before you the more you relate to her internal light, and the more you relate to yours; the quiet effulgence growing into still river merging you upwards with the sky, dissipating you like clouds dissolving in the white sky. You burn, but the fire heaving you is a smokeless kind of flame, burning on nothing but purity; silence itself being a forest in flames, yet deeply at peace and in harmony with itself. Words, silences, both gain the odd quality of being one and the same, dewdrops of passion falling from the sky and lacing the green, vibrant earth. A step further and her radiance is no longer confined to sky or dawn; she is now all around you, at all times, shining from within every object and substance, every being and creature, even the faceless wind is pregnant with her, even the blackness of the night. She is the inner pulse of life, ever present, eternal. In every breath and moment you feel her, a light bursting through the seams of existence and dissolving you into light, subsuming you through the seams and back into the origins, diluting you in the substance that forged her into being, that eternal creature, that creature whose light creates the world, the earth and the sky.
Free Verse # 210 (the heart of a flower)
She offered him the ocean
in the chalice of her palms;
the night and its stars
in her obsidian eyes.
~
Love enters us like the storm
Troubles the waters of the sea,
Making its waves gush out unto the shore
Its heart’s hidden gems, its mysteries.
~
Waking
I felt you on my lips,
A tremor of infinite softness breaking
As the dawn in the sky.
~
Love whispers, but for you to hear you must have the heart of a flower, the ears of a butterfly.
~
Gazing into the ocean
Slowly, with the cadence of the waves,
Their gazes melted into one
As their fingers clutched deeper
Like the roots of an old tree.
~
She wore the sun
for a flower in her dark hair,
and lo!
the sun could not be more happy!
~
The poet must, above all else, be pure of heart.
~
The silent enigma –
Like a white flower
She weaves herself
In the very heart of dawn,
Soaked in the red tide
Of its infinite softness.
~
We touched
And something rose into me
As from within
I started to fill with water;
The outflow of this surge –
Light and poetry.
~
She wore the night for wings
and whenever she fluttered
the earth filled with stars
Tanka # 12
Though soft and luring,
Her eyes, the lofty highlands
Of the peregrine
Whose golden feathers, burning,
Make the air their poetry.
Senryu # 19
dark as the night,
her eyes
sing the stars
Free Verse # 111 (gazing in your halcyon eyes)
Hecatomb of lust,
night’s stars on our wild altar
doused in burning blood.
~
My hands over our face,
a tidal flow of stars.
My heart, a sun upon my lips,
kissed between your eyes.
~
The heart that knows the splendour of dawn
is blessed with a light no darkness can soil.
~
To consume and be consumed,
a desire so ravenous and pure
it delivers our trembling bodies
unto the burning altar of love.
~
As our lips merge our heart,
rooted in the garden of forever,
blooms into the sun.
~
Each poem,
a flick of tongue along your endless curves
smearing wine and honey and reaping — ecstasy.
~
Gazing in your halcyon eyes
a dawn so clear enters my soul
that I break into song.
Rooted in Love 