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I like most of Kahlil Gibran's poems, but sometimes they are more stories than poems. So I chose the following short one:
The Good God and the Evil God
The Good God and the Evil God met on the mountain top.
The Good God said, "Good day to you, brother."
The Evil God made no answer.
And the Good God said, "You are in a bad humour today."
"Yes, " said the Evil God, "for of late I have been oftem mistaken for you, called bu your name, and treated as if I were you, and it ill-pleases me."
And The Good God said, "But I too have been mistaken for you and called by your name."
The Evil God walked away cursing the stupidity of man.
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,
In life after life, in age after age forever.
My spell-bound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms
In life after life, in age after age forever.
Whenever I Hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell -
Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.
A lone young shepherd lived in pain
withdrawn from pleasure and contentment,
his thoughts fixed on a shepherd-girl
his heart an open wound with love.
He weeps, but not from the wound of love,
there is no pain in such affliction,
even though the heart is pierced;
he weeps in knowing he's been forgotten.
That one thought: his shining one
has forgotten him, is such great pain
that he bows to brutal handling in a foreign land,
his heart an open wound with love.
The shepherd says: I pity the one
who draws herself back from my love,
and does not seek the joy of my presence,
though my heart is an open wound with love for her.
After a long time he climbed a tree,
and spread his shining arms,
and hung by them, and died,
his heart an open wound with love.
PERSUADING DREAMS-PARADOXICAL IMAGERY
by avi yama dass ; )
Instigating your own imagery of what is inside by fusion of the paradoxes of what’s inside. The totalitarian combustion of feelings and thoughts deep inside…hidden only to surface in the recognition brought on by in gestations of scents, calmness’s that lay below your own fluid apprehensions and dusty desires. They come to surface in remembered dreams. A puzzle of your universe that dwells consistently, all the time, in your fluids. A microcosm of the nucleolus, your nucleolus as is theirs…as is ours… from our center. Spinning in all directions with no eminent end…or beginning.
Not tirelessly do we spin. Asleep or awake. Intertwining the atoms that compose the entire universe within us in a lit up basket weave effect, changing shape with time that does not truly exist because the moment changes and time changes. The wind blows us…we are the wind blowing. Nothing to hold or grasp on to except our persuading dreams in the instant and fleeting moment.
There are no plateaus or mountains to cross because we truly are always there fusing the non past with the future to pass on to the moment within. Within you, without you.
And so…..you sit on the toilet, paper in hand. Reaching to wipe your ass. Then you remember where you are or do you? Wiping away the past, ready to ingest your future that will pass…within you and without you. It’s those links. Those links. Hmmmm, those links.
Like her trimester brought on by the links to dissolve into the fluids and sprout anew. The flower of the seed that flowers a seed to seed a flower…and so it goes on…and on…and on, and….
A juggernaut laced in a melting morphasis of my own desires. My ego on vacation after being bumped on the ride down here. A recreational laughter that bellows the songs of my imagery only to see the links I create. From the information I digest and transform to my cabinet of desires that lay in the folds of my brain and soul. Rattling around like a marble in a rusty can. The costumes I wear, we wear. Creating the uniforms of information or misinformation to live in…Hey, smile. It’s OK I told myself.
Stand up top of myself and looking down at me and laugh…then continue down the sunlit dusty road of my dreams, our dreams. Fun, ain’t it? Is to me.
Sitting under the shade of my mushroom, blowing my harp in the sun.
The reeds of my harp feel the dampness they need…a mirage as the carrot on a stick as does the soul in my circle see. Chasing….the quantum physics that lie on my toilet paper ready to catch the links…
How can I pick a favorite? There are so many I love. I have a special place in my heart for this one...
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you---
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me---we two---you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me---who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records---Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white---
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me---
although you're older---and white---
and somewhat more free.
Mine is Invictus. I'm not big on poetry. Half the time, no, 90% of the time, poetry just goes over my head. However, the following poem I have read since high school (11 yrs ago) and to this day, I am still touched:
Invictus (unconquered)
by: William Ernest Henley
1849-1903
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods maybe
For my unconquerable soul
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Loom but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
A lone young shepherd lived in pain
withdrawn from pleasure and contentment,
his thoughts fixed on a shepherd-girl
his heart an open wound with love.
He weeps, but not from the wound of love,
there is no pain in such affliction,
even though the heart is pierced;
he weeps in knowing he's been forgotten.
That one thought: his shining one
has forgotten him, is such great pain
that he bows to brutal handling in a foreign land,
his heart an open wound with love.
The shepherd says: I pity the one
who draws herself back from my love,
and does not seek the joy of my presence,
though my heart is an open wound with love for her.
After a long time he climbed a tree,
and spread his shining arms,
and hung by them, and died,
his heart an open wound with love.
John of the Cross
Has a deeper meaning...
Wow, some poem. Does the end mean he had hung himself?
I had no shoes and complained
until I met a man with no feet.
I don't know if this would rate as a small poem. But anyway.
For years my parents had this wooden plague by the door of the summer cottage and they put there so that my siblings and I would appreciate what we had. I remember of all of us at one time or another repeating the lil phrase. Even today as adults when one of us out the blue repeats the phrase ,it brings back a memory of a simpler, sweeter time in our youth.
One Christmas during the American Civil War, Henry W Longfellow wrote this poem to express his dispair. Since it is once again Christmas and once again we are fighting and dying in a Civil War--it seems timely. The power of his words and the transparency of his emotion deserves to be re read as more than a Christmas Carol.
"I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
Till ringing, singing on its way
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”
Great poems move me to tears.....I am crying now.
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Persuading Dreams-paradoxical Imagery
However, the following poem I have read since high school (11 yrs ago) and to this day, I am still touched:
I like it! I like very much! Thanks.
