Inseparable

One single land dissected by two great rivers.
One solitary mass of earth divided
by a line of doubtful identity.
Here, rain ceases to be rain and
Children grow as bloodstained leaves of grass.
This land, some call it the battlefield;
for others, it is their homeland.
Here, the stray dogs greet
the dwellers in the morning
with insomnia of sharp yelps, and
vultures feast on their lifeless bodies
in the harsh noon.
Among these ruins one can not live.
But we live among these ruins!
Live among these and not have a heart
which is not wounded
by the memories of a vanished homeland?
Impossible in my language!
The wound needs healing.
Instead of the vile smell of gunpowder,
fragrance of jasmine in the air,
this spring, and the spring after that.

Having lived together long,
longer than many lifetimes,
in this parenthesized geography
We have become inseparable,
as friends or foes.
To take up arms against another is
to descend into the heart of the inferno.
To unlearn history is
to enter a nightmare without an exit.
There is hope if we close, once and for all,
this book of divided theology;
if we sharpen the edge of our love
and not of the knife,
there is hope
for a chance in a lifetime
to wake up free, free of fear
and climb the heights of history
under the sky of peaceful Mesopotamia.

I am returning a few things

From behind the aisle decked with
juicy cantaloupes and apples and more apples,
from a pair of anonymous eyes,
two hummingbirds darted off to where
I am picking up a box of cereals
for breakfast and I see her seeing me.
I have not turned into a pillar of salt
and she has not turned into a heap of ashes!
Who is she? What is she doing among these carnivores?
Is she also one among them crocodiles?
Sated momentarily,
having fed on half the human race.

Be whatever that you may
I am returning without a contest
these eyes shaped like hummingbird
to your hyacinth head filled with springtime
while retaining this drop of pure and ancient light
as my own.

Bravo! Bravo!

Crucifix Will Stay in Quebec National Assembly Says Premier
Says "We won't rewrite history. The church has played a major role in who we are today as a society…"

By Hilary White

QUEBEC CITY, May 23, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com ) - The crucifix above the Speaker's chair in the Quebec National Assembly will stay, says Premier Jean Charest. Responding to a report by a pair of academics on the problems of integrating immigrants into Quebec society, Charest said, "We won't rewrite history. The church has played a major role in who we are today as a society, the crucifix is more than a religious symbol."
You can read the full article here

Fire

Before the thick dusk from the surface of the dark water rises
we have lit brightly the earth by a certain fire
said to have been stolen by a man named Prometheus.
Prometheus, it was said of him, as punishment, was fed to vultures when he was alive.
On our degenerating liver we now let the vultures feed, to keep the fire alive.

The darkness of the world is dispelled with light from a stolen fire,
To keep the fire burning, light has been banished from our souls,
While the world shines bright, the glow in our souls grows dimmer and dimmer.

Earth injured

There are inventions and uninventions
in every cycle of progression and regression.
There are questions to be asked and answers to be found.
For all the answers that are sought there is earth, rare and rich.
At will and with no concern, rocks are lifted and blown up into pieces,
the ground is turned upside down with arms hewn
out of steel and corrugated imagination.
We are surprised by what we find and we marvel at our reach.
If the earth were human, we are the worms feeding upon her flesh,
killing her slowly, killing ourselves consequently.

Earth perforated, earth scarred,
Earth too much injured by civilization
Who, among us, will heal her?

Holy Communion

The moon, new and dark, in the sky
marked with stripes of black and white,
having consumed the sun,
rises, full and bright, in the sky
still marked with stripes of black and white.

Hymn

A cluster
of words
as sweet
as grapes
and voices
cool as water
running
over
my hand
knotted in
a tight fist
opening up as
a wild flower
for a brief
rendezvous
with destiny.

I live

in a quaint village, on a hillside
not too steep and conveniently accessible,
overlooking a wide pastureland.
For neighbors – villagers who are neither rich nor poor,
and only with snowflakes to talk to
on dark nights illuminated mostly by pure imagination.

Irreversible Water

Who are the masters and who are the pupils?
Who are these people who speak a privileged language?
Alpha and omega,cosmic constant, universal love,
ligase and gyrase, centromeres and telomeres.
This place, a place to seek the light of knowledge,
Some strange light of some strange knowledge!
Telomeres – the tail ends of a chromosome is not the center of life!
Life, life, there is such a thing called life outside all imaginable paradigms.
Is life more or less than life if such and such constants were
to be so and so variables? True or false, tell me, tell me in one word?

Once I came across a man, he was happy,
happy like a ghost visible in the broad daylight.
Without a care, he walked,
he walked in the middle of the road
teeming with automobiles of late afternoon traffic.
And he walked as if he was walking on the water.
Indeed, he walked barely touching the ground!
He was in truth a happy man who seemed to have
firmly grasped life by its slippery horns.
I raised my hands to him and asked if he would
let me write his life-history. He replied, “From the time
when water became wine which turned into blood,
Life has never been the same again. Bring me a glass of water
and I will tell you instead the long and short of your own
biography in a burgundy-colored drop of wine.
While searching for the meaning of life you have lost happiness.
While searching for happiness you have found a life fragmented by discontent.
You brought fire from heaven and fuel from the bowel of the earth.
Out of these elements, by a strange alchemy, you attempted
to create an endless happiness and immortality.
Man,you may devise your own immortality
but can you save yourself from your extravagant ingenuity?"
I say no, because we have begun to breathe,
begun to breathe our own stale and acrid breath.
All to you, O endless happiness and immortality!
But some must still die so that others may live,
it has always been so and it must continue to be so, for our own good.
If all must live forever then it would not be long before we are forced
to drink brine of our own body. What price! Indeed it is a heavy price
to pay for a bagful of gloom of our own creation.
Such immortality with promise of so meager a return, I do not want it.
Such tormented immortality – a deferred dead amidst misery, I do not want it.
I do not want it, for life becomes but once, without turning back.

The present must cease to be so that future can become.
The old must make way for the young and the river must flow, for water is irreversible.
The old must not suck life out of marrow intended for the young.
for then there may come a day when nothing is ever enough.
(Those with myriads needs must not desire immortality.)
They may cover their ears, but they will still hear
the unmuffled voices of children crying out for justice.
They may dig their hands deep into their breasts and
history will not absolve them,
they may plait their hands into a bouquet of roses
but the future will not condone them,
even though there is such a thing called
life outside the established paradigms.
The truth is this: the earth rests,
trembling, on fragile wings of a butterfly.
Let us return it to its primitive purity,
before it is too late,
though the water is still and irreversible.

Anticipating the Passion

If you had really wanted to be strong,
you would not have come from a woman's womb.
For messiahs are quarried from mountains
where the sturdy and strong comes from stone.

Are you not sorry to have despoiled your land
by such limitations? I am weak, don't you see;
I only had streams of milk or tears to offer,
and you were ever so much more than me.

So much ado when your birth to me was announced.
You could have been born fierce and wild from the start.
If you only needed tigers to tear you to pieces,
why did I learn gentleness as an art

by which I wove for you a soft, pure gown
without even the slightest seam
for comfort--: that's how my life has been,
which you now have turned upside down.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1912)
(From the Life of the Virgin Mary)