I will lift up my eyes to the hills-
from whence comes my help?
My help comes from the Lord
Who made heaven and earth.
(Psalm 121:1, 2)

Face of Man

Face of Man
Jacqueline du Pre

Sunday, June 29, 2008

What are dreams if one cannot

If the heaven does not open its doors,
if the river did not return as rain,
who will water our dreams? And
wouldn’t the lilacs of spring crumble and fall back
as broken water upon an abandoned altar?

Branch by branch, from stamen to stamen,
a small grain of life ascends towards the infinite
to fill the space as keen as eye of a needle,
and in the end, to die a death which is full of happiness.
A happy death, having paid the dues in full measure!
A happy death, having arrived at the appointed destination!

Man cannot live without dreams having once dreamt before.
But what are dreams if one cannot undream them?
The river may never return or the lilacs may never bloom again.
But amidst all the unmapped corners I pause to offer
a simple hymn to the Almighty that
in dreaming life may be granted
a respite from its many schemes
and awakened free of harsh regrets.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Becoming

With clarity in my vision I step off the cliff-edge
to ride on the back of a beam of light.
My head explodes inside my mind,
I am thinking aloud and my thoughts have no voice.
To speak is human, I speak a language
and my language has no vocabulary.
Where I am, the space is filled with sky
and I fill the sky with invented voices.
My body is inside another body which is not mine.
Her lips spell me out and it is the silence.
With silence I erase my invented sky,
And, bit by bit, I become myself in solitude.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

A short biography of river

From faraway mountains of my homeland,
a drop of water, a mere globule as slight as a trickle,
Drop by drop, dripping at one point in space
and over length of centuries, began its course
as thin as a ribbon of wet substance
towards an unknown geography.

It scratched out a line from winter to summer
across a map of unfamiliar landscape, full of
Dark nights and salamanders.
Drop by drop fed by dew from roots and leaves
of forest vegetations and wild grass, by fits and starts,
That water, that tiny drop of water became a river
between two regions of living with their opaque meanings.

Sometimes the earth opened its submarine gate and
At other times the mountains parted
and through their infinite thickness a river runs,
Enriched with spilled rubies and yellow stones.
Through them, a river runs to the call of another life,
its course as long as the eternity.

Amethyst of water from the hands of God,
in the land beyond its native horizon!
To that granite audacity which is humility
even the mountains must sometimes bow their heads.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Water

Water, that primeval element of creation,
Being humble, it is containable taking easily
The shape of that which contains it.
When poured into a kimono it blooms as a blossom of cherry,
Upon falling, it falls into a pair of blue eyes, turning into an ocean.

But when I fall into a haiku, I become a river.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Christian missionaries can help eradicate poverty

Efforts of several luminaries to get the rich nations to write off the debts of the poor nations are a wonderful gesture. In spite of these efforts, poverty will prevail if people do not have access to financial and business management knowledge. To give alms to the poor is a noble thing, but it is never enough to cover the face of poverty. Not even for one short single day. It will show up again soon. It is sadly true though, as some one wise once said, we will always have our poor. But we can reduce it to a manageable level. Western missionaries provide valuable social, educational and medical services in the poor countries of the world. Perhaps, these missionary teams may also consider including team members with financial and business skills who can teach, the people they are trying to help, how to run profitable small business and even make microloans to help them change their economic conditions. When given such knowledge, people tend to be more enterprising. Entrepreneurial spirits, together with good government-policy, can result in a vibrant economy.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

“God seemed vaporous as any perfume” – Mary Karr

Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer by Mary Karr

To confess my unlikely Catholicism in Poetry—a journal founded in part on and for the godless, twentieth-century disillusionaries of J. Alfred Prufrock and his pals—feels like an act of perversion kinkier than any dildo-wielding dominatrix could manage on HBO’s “Real Sex Extra.” I can’t even blame it on my being a cradle Catholic, some brainwashed escapee of the pleated skirt and communion veil who—after a misspent youth and facing an Eleanor Rigby-like dotage—plodded back into the confession booth some rainy Saturday. Read the full article here

Thursday, June 5, 2008

When Death Came Looking for Him

When death came looking for him he shouted back at it, “I cannot shut God's House!” This is the story of how a young Iraqi priest Fr. Ragheed and his companions were gunned down in the street. To read the full story click
here.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Woman indivisible

He cuts her up into cubes of shadows and light.
He pastes using many invented conjunctions
her eyes and their adjectives in the middle of my poetry,
and in his canvas pronouns of her various feminine forms.

At all angles and under varying shades of brightness,
there she is, for all to see, as prevalent as
parts of speech of language.
She sits in many of her fragmented poses,
Revealing only who she could have been,
While effortlessly concealing who she is, right
in the middle of our painted sentences and framed canvas.

Despite the earnest efforts both with paints and words,
she, something of her, always escapes our finite knowing
And stands outside of our vanquished labor,
incomprehensible and indivisible as infinity.

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