Defeat

 

Amit and Naroop

Defeat, my Defeat, my solitude and my aloofness;

You are dearer to me than a thousand triumphs,

And sweeter to my heart than all world-glory.

 

Defeat, my Defeat, my self-knowledge and my defiance,

Through you I know that I am yet young and swift of foot

And not to be trapped by withering laurels.

And in you I have found aloneness

And the joy of being shunned and scorned.

 

Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield,

In your eyes I have read

That to be enthroned is to be enslaved,

And to be understood is to be leveled down,

And to be grasped is but to reach one’s fullness

And like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed.

 

Defeat, my Defeat, my bold companion,

You shall hear my songs and my cries and my silences,

And none but you shall speak to me of the beating of wings,

And urging of seas,

And of mountains that burn in the night,

And you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul.

 

Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage,

You and I shall laugh together with the storm,

And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,

And we shall stand in the sun with a will,

And we shall be dangerous.

KAHLIL GIBRAN

Good and Evil XXII

 

And one of the elders of the city said, "Speak to us of Good and Evil."

And he answered:

Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts, it 

drinks even of dead waters.

You are good when you are one with yourself.

Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.

For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house.

And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles yet 

sink not to the bottom.

You are good when you strive to give of yourself.

Yet you are not evil when you seek gain for yourself.

For when you strive for gain you are but a root that clings to the earth and sucks at her breast.

Surely the fruit cannot say to the root, 

"Be like me, ripe and full and ever giving of your abundance."

For to the fruit giving is a need, as receiving is a need to the root.

You are good when you are fully awake in your speech,

Yet you are not evil when you sleep while your tongue staggers without purpose.

And even stumbling speech may strengthen a weak tongue.

You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps.

Yet you are not evil when you go thither limping.

Even those who limp go not backward.

But you who are strong and swift, see that you do not limp before the lame, 

deeming it kindness.

You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good,

You are only loitering and sluggard.

Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.

In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness: and that longing is in all of you.

But in some of you that longing is a torrent rushing with might to the sea, 

carrying the secrets of the hillsides and the songs of the forest.

And in others it is a flat stream that loses itself in angles and bends and lingers 

before it reaches the shore.

But let not him who longs much say to him who longs little, 

"Wherefore are you slow and halting?"

For the truly good ask not the naked, 

"Where is your garment?" nor the houseless, 

"What has befallen your house?"

Khalil Gibran

Jalaluddin Rumi Balkhi

 

I

 Sometimes I forget completely

what companionship is.

Unconscious and insane, I spill sad

energy everywhere. My story

gets told in various ways: a romance,

a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy.

Divide up my forgetfulness to any number,

it will go around.

These dark suggestions that I follow,

are they a part of some plan?

Friends, be careful. Don’t come near me

out of curiosity, or sympathy.

II

Consider the difference

in our actions and God’s actions.

We often ask, “Why did you do that?”

or “Why did I act like that?”

We do act, and yet everything we do

is God’s creative action.

We look back and analyze the events

of our lives, but there is another way

of seeing, a backward-and-forward-at-once

vision, that is not rationally understandable.

Only God can understand it.

Satan made the excuse, you caused me to fall,

whereas Adam said to God, We did this

to ourselves. After this repentance,

God asked Adam, Since all is within

my foreknowledge, why didn’t you

defend yourself with that reason?

Adam answered, I was afraid,

and I wanted to be reverent.

Whoever acts with respect will get respect.

Whoever brings sweetness will be served almond cake.

Good women are drawn to be with good men.

Honor your friend.

Or treat him rudely,

and see what happen!

Love, tell an incident now

that will clarify this mystery

of how we act freely, and are yet

compelled. One hand shakes with palsy.

Another shakes because you slapped it away.

Both tremblings come from God,

but you feel guilty for the one,

and what about the other?

These are intellectual questions.

The spirit approaches the matter

differently. Omar once had a friend, a scientist,

Bu’l-Hakam, who was flawless at solving

empirical problems, but he could not follow Omar

into the area of illumination and wonder.

Now I return to the text, “And He is with you,

wherever you are,” but when have I ever left it!

Ignorance is God’s prison.

Knowing is God’s palace.

We sleep in God’s unconsciousness.

We wake in God’s open hand.

We weep God’s rain.

We laugh God’s lightning.

Fighting and peacefulness

both take place within God.

Who are we then

in this complicated world-tangle,

that is really just the single, straight

line down at the beginning of ALLAH?

Nothing.

We are

emptiness.

III

How does a part of the word leave the world?

How can wetness leave water?

Don’t try to put out a fire

by throwing on more fire!

Don’t wash a wound with blood!

No matter how fast you run,

your shadow more than keeps up.

Sometimes, it’s in front.

Only full, overhead sun

diminishes your shadow.

But that shadow has been serving you!

What hurts you, bless you.

Darkness is your candle.

Your boundaries are your quest.

I can explain this, but it would break

the glass cover on your heart,

and there’s no fixing that.

You must have shadow and light source both.

Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.

When from that tree, feathers and wings sprout

on you, be quieter than a dove.

Don’t open your mouth for even a cooooooo.

When a frog slips into the water, the snake

cannot get it. Then the frog climbs back out

and croaks, and the snake moves toward him again.

Even if the frog learned to hiss, still the snake

would hear through the hiss the information

he needed, the frog voice underneath.

But if the frog could be completely silent,

then the snake would go back to sleeping,

and the frog could reach the barley.

The soul lives there in the silent breath.

And the grain of barley is such that,

when you put it in the ground,

it grows.

Are these enough words,

Or shall I squeeze more juice from this?

Who am I, my friend?

IV

Who makes these changes?

I shoot an arrow right.

It lands left.

I ride after a deer and find myself

chased by a hog.

I plot to get what I want

and end up in prison.

I dig pits to trap others

and fall in.

I should be suspicious

of what I want.

Jalaluddin Rumi Balkhi 

A Nation's Strength

 What makes a nation's pillars high

And its foundations strong?

What makes it mighty to defy

The foes that round it throng?

It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand

Go down in battle shock;

Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,

Not on abiding rock.

Is it the sword? Ask the red dust

Of empires passed away;

The blood has turned their stones to rust,

Their glory to decay.

And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown

Has seemed to nations sweet;

But God has struck its luster down

In ashes at his feet.

Not gold but only men can make

A people great and strong;

Men who for truth and honor's sake

Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,

Who dare while others fly...

They build a nation's pillars deep

And lift them to the sky.

William Ralph Emerson

in, Our Little Kings and Queens at Home and at School 

Afterword

 

Reading what I have just written, I now believe 

I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been 

slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly 

but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort 

sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes. 

Why did I stop? Did some instinct 

discern a shape, the artist in me 

intervening to stop traffic, as it were? 

A shape. Or fate, as the poets say, 

intuited in those few long ago hours -

I must have thought so once. 

And yet I dislike the term 

which seems to me a crutch, a phase, 

the adolescence of the mind, perhaps -

Still, it was a term I used myself, 

frequently to explain my failures. 

Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings 

now seem to me simply 

local symmetries, metonymic 

baubles within immense confusion -

Chaos was what I saw. 

My brush froze - I could not paint it. 

Darkness, silence: that was the feeling. 

What did we call it then? 

A "crisis of vision" corresponding, I believed, 

to the tree that confronted my parents, 

but whereas they were forced 

forward into the obstacle, 

I retreated or fled -

Mist covered the stage (my life). 

Characters came and went, costumes were changed, 

my brush hand moved side to side 

far from the canvas, 

side to side, like a windshield wiper. 

Surely this was the desert, the dark night. 

(In reality, a crowded street in London, 

the tourists waving their colored maps.) 

One speaks a word: I. 

Out of this stream 

the great forms -

I took a deep breath. And it came to me 

the person who drew that breath 

was not the person in my story, his childish hand 

confidently wielding the crayon -

Had I been that person? A child but also 

an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear, for whom 

the vegetation parts -

And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted 

solitude Kant perhaps experienced 

on his way to the bridges -

(We share a birthday.) 

Outside, the festive streets 

were strung, in late January, with exhausted Christmas lights. 

A woman leaned against her lover’s shoulder 

singing Jacques Brel in her thin soprano -

Bravo! the door is shut. 

Now nothing escapes, nothing enters -

I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert 

stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems) 

on all sides, shifting as I speak, 

so that I was constantly 

face to face with blankness, that 

stepchild of the sublime, 

which, it turns out, 

has been both my subject and my medium. 

What would my twin have said, had my thoughts 

reached him? 

Perhaps he would have said 

in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument) 

after which I would have been 

referred to religion, the cemetery where 

questions of faith are answered. 

The mist had cleared. The empty canvases 

were turned inward against the wall. 

The little cat is dead (so the song went). 

Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks. 

And the sun says yes. 

And the desert answers 

your voice is sand scattered in wind.

Louise Glück

Poesia

 

Gus Fine Art

 Como para Sísifo,

a vida para mim é esta rocha.

Carrego-a e conduzo-a até ao alto.

Quando cai volto a apanhá-la

e, tomando-a entre os braços,

levanto-a outra vez.

É uma forma de esperança.

Penso que teria sido mais triste

se não tivesse podido arrastar uma pedra

sem outro motivo que não fosse o amor.

Levá-la por amor até ao alto.

Joan Margarit

in, "Misteriosamente feliz"

DISCURSO DO MÉTODO

 

 Em criança, eu já procurava as janelas

para fugir com o olhar.

Desde então, quando entro nalgum sítio,

Fixo onde é a porta e onde deixei o casaco.

Liberdade, para mim, quer dizer fuga.

O mundo está cheio de portas,

como o sexo, afinal, em caso de emergência.

Mas todas se vão fechando, e depressa,

para fugir, ficarão somente aquelas

janelas da infância.

De par em par abertas para saltar.

in, “Misteriosamente Feliz”

Joan Margarit

Weep not for me

 

Weep not for me though I have gone

Into that gentle night

Grieve if you will, but not for long

Upon my soul’s sweet flight

I am at peace, my soul’s at rest

There is no need for tears

For with your love I was so blessed

For all those many years

There is no pain, I suffer not

The fear is now all gone

Put now these things out of your thoughts

In your memory, I live on

Remember not my fight for breath

Remember not the strife

Please do not dwell upon my death

But celebrate my life

Constance Jenkins

Não deites fora as cartas de amor

 

Westend61

 Elas não te abandonarão.

Passará o tempo, apagar-se-á o desejo

— essa flecha de sombra —

e os rostos sensuais, inteligentes, belíssimos

ocultar-se-ão em ti, no fundo de um espelho.

Cairão os anos. Cansar-te-ão os livros.

Decairás ainda mais

e perderás até a poesia.

O ruído frio da cidade nos vidros

acabará por ser a tua única música,

e as cartas de amor que tiveres guardado

serão a tua última literatura.

Joan Margarit