Skipping Stones
| October 12, 2012 | 
|
Stone Garden, Kazuyuki Ohtsu
by Yahia Lababidi
Poetic Ideal: a language scrubbed clean by silences.
If we listen, the air is heavy with poems, ripe for plucking.
Branches are roots, too, in the sky.
Perhaps it is not poetry that purifies the language of the tribe, but Silence.
The true poet, or mystic, is not too proud to admit that, in matters great and small, they cannot proceed until they receive further instructions.
One never becomes a poet, except when they are writing a poem.
***
Dark Room
Awoke, with an unseen
reel of dream film
I’d found wanderingAnd, now wondering
where does one develop
such unreal pictures?***
Love in the digital age: I hang on your every tweet.
There’s nothing virtual about connection.
Virtual world, real emotions in real time.
Social media: the art of living out loud.
Most of us lead double lives, nowadays, online.
Social media might make us feel less lonely, but it also makes it more difficult to be alone.
A watched tweet is never retweeted.
***
Exchanges
Perhaps, we are negotiating
not just with one, but always two
-who share the same soil, it is true-
one who lives, another who is dyingA shift in balance begins to take place
once a love of silence is confessed
its roots run deep, its shade a world
and her fruits impossible to forgetFrom the first, we surrender something
and, gradually, consent to be emptied
transfixed by so much soundless music
drunk and sated through lipless mouthsWhat use to name this silent master
preparing us for dying or the Divine
(I’m not sure there is a difference)
but know in embracing it, we let go.***
How modulated the voice of the hours – from dawn’s tremulous hope to dusk’s winsome ache…
The great whale hunt of the spirit life is also pursued in dreams.
The play of ideas is eternal. We merely shuffle onstage, and off, to introduce them to one another.
Fear of ridicule keeps us mediocre.
We can easily become prisoners of certain memories; remember, there’s freedom in forgetting.
How the present and future are always shuffling the cards called past.
This is the symbolic life, the previous and the next are the real.
Cover photograph by Baz Masters
About the Author:
Yahia Lababidi is a Pushcart-nominated poet, and the author of three books: Signposts to Elsewhere (aphorisms) Trial by Ink (essays) and Fever Dreams (poetry). Most recently, Lababidi collaborated on a collection of literary dialogues, titled: The Artist as Mystic. For more information, please visit his website
| Poetry: | Culture: | History: |
|---|---|---|
 |  |  |
Golden Handcuffs Daniel Bosch Make any cento you want! But try to make it as good as you want it to be. You don’t really want Seidel’s freedom. His poems are licensed by privilege, prestige and money — lots of all three. His deliberate transgressions look like power — to poets, any use of power looks like freedom. But I just read all Seidel’s work, straight through, and I think he’s wearing golden handcuffs. Read More | Pale Youths in Love Masha Tupitsyn I remember when I was a pre-teen and they moved into a loft across the street from me in Tribeca, where I lived. And an older neighbor friend told me they were living in her building, on the top floor. I saw him at my corner deli, and on the street smoking, but never her. At night, I sometimes looked up at their windows and saw their lights on. He was not very impressive in person. Cute, but no big deal. Read More | What is Work? John Budd Without a written record, we cannot know with certainty how the earliest humans thought about work, but the importance of sharing food and other resources means that prehistoric work embodied at least an element of serving the needs of a community rather than just those of an individual and his or her immediate family. Read More |
