Monday, October 18, 2021

La umanità nuova

Come the revolution our poems will all conform

to the deepest ideal within the heart of man

pure egalitarian esteem will become the norm

that nurtures each through a long fruitful lifespan

happenstance will join love's madcap caravan

time itself assuming a mode gentle & warm

violence will cease! & to the spiritual plan

come the revolution our poems will all conform


Each event of life will be seen as a petal unfolding

in the perfect place at the choicest time & we

will be daily astounded how we're now beholding

blussful wave on wave in a boisterous sea of glee

humankind will at last have hit its winning spree!

like an alchemist whose crucible is a'golding

every thought being wreathed in gossamer poetry

each event of life will be seen as a petal unfolding


That an age of intuition will emerge

to replace in time our era of rational thought

that of such a fresh chapter we're on the verge

that its rosy fragrance can e'en now be caught

that this is largesse from God not an ornament bought

at the TED Talk shop where oftentimes we'll splurge

is a pearl through hide & seek our souls have sought

that an age of intuition will emerge


Now we find ourselves a'sail on a novel voyage

over waters dark toward an unknown haven of landing

like a couple cloistered in their wedding carriage

like a newborn who must crawl in lieu of standing

like a slumberous dreamer suddenly at the ending

of a nightmare like a vessel amid the boyage

of an unknown port with darkling dusk descending

now we find ourselves a'sail on a novel voyage


We assume the ego's conflicts are required

to push forward in the narrative of our lives

& the same expanded keeps society fired

for the thrust that drives our buzzing social hives

yet the ones who into Unity's ocean dive

when they surface bring a vision so inspired

it retools the route whereby our thoughts arrive

to assume the ego's conflicts are required


Humankind is ready for a complete reboot!

like a noisy day that's ready for night's hush

like a wilted flower ready for fine fruit

like a gambler waiting for his royal flush

like a Californian in a new Gold Rush

like a milkmaid hearkening Lord Krishna's flute

like a field well sown awaiting verdure lush

humankind is ready for a complete reboot!


That the New Humanity can become our reality

Is a point worth adding to our computations!

yes we've weathered many a scrape in rough duality

having scuffled through a myriad reincarnations

yet of revelations meriting contemplations

let us use (to quote Cole Porter) our mentality

& review Meher Baba's bright prognostications

that the New Humanity can become our reality


////////////////////

This rather ambitious poem contemplates the topic of "the New Humanity" (as described and predicted by Meher Baba in a discourse with that title, first published I believe in the late 1930s).

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

"Of gentle maidens" [translated from the Shi Jing]

Of gentle maidens she most fair awaits me by the wall's corner she I love but see not there I scratch my head – a forlorner Of gentle maidens she most comely brings a red-hued reed to me the red-hued reed indeed is lovely pleasing is the girl's beauty She yields from the meadow a soft leaflet truly lovely! yea 'tis rare not that thou art comely but thou art the gift of one most fair



I first translated this poem more than 40 years ago. It came to mind today, and I've given it a fresh polish.  My prior rendering of verse 1 had been:

Of gentle maidens she most fair
awaits me by the wall I know
she I love but see not there
I scratch my head bewildered so

My new translation of line 2 is more literal, more accurate.
If I recall correctly, Arthur Waley translated line 4 as:
"I scratch my head and pace up and down"

The Shi Jing -- an anthology of ancient folksongs -- is traditionally believed to have been compiled by Confucius. He makes reference to some of the poems in some of his discourses. This courtship poem has always struck me as quite special. And I like how the poet addresses the leaflet-gift (in the 3rd stanza) directly.

What sparked my recollection of this olden poem today?  A terse tweet:
"what is the theme of this poem" liking boy
Pascale/Palaces @pascalepalaces
10:55 AM · Jan 4, 2021

Thursday, December 31, 2020

ghazal for JANET FINE

Too soon for trips!   don't leave   this festive party
the moon's eclipse would grieve   this festive party

we met along a road   toward a rare concert
the tablas' taps retrieve   this festive party

you twirled in kathak   as   a whippersnapper
must Rudra's steps re-weave   this festive party?

you found a manuscript   on pleasing women
God's microfische conceived   this festive party

the dusk of palaces   caught your affection
you threw Raj Pipla's eve   this festive party

you sliced my heart   critiquing   my first movie
don't seal your lips!   nor leave   this festive party

I still have tales to tell!   who'll understand me?
don't doubt my quips   believe   this festive party

I won't be brief!   I'll flourish   my bandana!
I've got tricks up my sleeve   this festive party

the kiss of death   they say   is liberating
reluctant lips receive   this festive party

the smile of Tukaram   lives in the painting
newspaper clips   frame Jiv   this festive party

does Bollywood recall   one who first named her?
the skinnydips are brief   this festive party

Mumbai Cairo New York   pearls for your piercing
low-budget trips don't peeve   this festive party

Ellen sends love from yon   out at East Hampton
there's contretemps with Steve   this festive party

too swiftly time's page flits!   we were still reading!
the boat tips   and upheaves this festive party

the ghazal's wit   wraps love   in lamentation
a form that fits the sleeve   this festive party

a million notes   the soul jots   on its journey
we've still   chits to retrieve   this festive party

in Haridwar   there's aarti   morn & evening
trays wave   as Shiv bereaves   this festive party

from Raphael accept   gratitude's bandish
his note   slips through the sieve   this festive party

Sunday, December 27, 2020

"What birds express" by Han Shan (寒山)


What birds express   my heart just cannot grapple with

at such times   I'll recline in my thatch hermitage

the peach & cherry   blossoming scarlet-scarlet

the willow & poplar   spangling slender foliage

the daybreak sun   o'er-sailing azurite hills

the limpid clouds   awash in the kelly ponds

who'd guess I pass beyond the dust of worlds

in swiftly ascending southerly Han Shan?


鳥 語 情 不 堪

其 時 臥 草 庵

櫻 桃 紅 爍 爍

楊 柳 正 毿 毿

旭 日 銜 青 嶂

晴 雲 洗 淥 潭

誰 知 出 塵 俗

馭 上 寒 山 南

________________________

Some Notes

I've repeatedly worked at / polished my translation of the above poem (now & then) over the past 40 years or so.

This fresh rendering was instigated when I recalled a couple relevant couplets from the Han Shan poem, in the course of dashing out what became an almost-mini-essay (in the form of a twitter thread) late last night. The impromptu Twitter essay grew out of my (initially one-word) response to a one-sentence question posed by a literary acquaintance, Sridala Swami (who lives & writes in Hyderabad, India).

Han Shan (literally Cold Mountain) was an otherwise anonymous (except for his nom-de-plume) poet of Tang dynasty China, believed to have flourished in the 9th century AD. Evidently he may originally have been some sort of petty official, but apparently grew disgusted with worldly life and (like other seekers influenced by Chan / Zen Buddhism in that era) he precipitously withdrew from society, residing (as his collected poems attest) for at least 30 years as a hermit at the eponymous, remote mountain in Suzhou Province, where he took to meditation with his shadow as his sole companion (though sporadically he may've gone down to chat with another poet-recluse at a small temple below).

Gary Snyder translated line 1 of the above poem as "I can't stand these bird songs"! About 40 years ago, I rendered that line as What birds express my heart cannot endure. Till today, I've been satisfied with that version. Why did I alter the phrase? In intervening years, my sensibility has been schooled by exposure to Farsi / Urdu poetics, with those traditions' ubiquitous use of baḥr [cadence] percolating into my poetry practice, this cadence principle impacting how I write in (or translate into) English in the past couple decades.  Today, I felt I needed line 1's cadence to better approximate line 2's cadence. (And last night I newly re-settled on "thatch" [rather than "grass" or "rustic" etc.] for the character 草 cao.)

Re: Snyder's rendering of line 1, there's an idiomatic truth to it (情不堪 qíng bùkān commonly signifies "I can't bear it"), while my old translation ("my heart cannot endure") is arguably more literal. If my latest rendering (w/ "grapple") invokes a new image, c'est la vie.  I might add: I owe much to Snyder, whose Han Shan translations (along with Burton Watson's [that's a PDF link] invited me to read this exceptional poet in the original. I remember first stumbling on a small-edition, large-page printing of Snyder's Cold Mountain Poems at erstwhile Shambhala Bookstore (on Shattuck Ave., Berkeley) in the 1970s. At times, such chance meetings with certain books can have long consequences. I think I only later (albeit not much later) began to appreciate Snyder's own work in its own right (but I digress).

In my above rendering of line 4, the poet's typical & beautiful & rigorous parallelism is admittedly partially obscured, for sake of affording a suggestion of the poet's rhyming (heard in the original); but I'd hasten to point the interested reader to my above-linked "essay" where I offer a more literal (& ergo a more elegantly parallelistic) translation of the parallelistic couplet (lines 3-4).

I might also add a caveat re lines 3 & 4: I'm not 100% sure "willow & poplar" represent (as they seem to) those two trees -- with ditto  re: "peach  & cherry"; or whether, contrarily, these phrases could've (at Han Shan's time) been, e.g., terms signifying a single (more specific) conifer & a single (more specific) fruit tree, respectively. Regarding such lexical questions, if UC Berkeley's late Prof. Edward Schafer were around, hypothetically he could've been pestered to address the issue (as he did many other obscure questions of Tang dynasty language in his writings). I only took one class from Prof. Schafer, and two classes from Prof. Michel Strickmann -- both of whom are now no more. The loss of olden associates (whether eccentric Sinologists or one's immediate family & friends) is a theme familiar in Han Shan's poetry -- as in life.

Re: line 7, the phrase 俗塵 súchén (which I render "the dust of worlds") is from the Buddhist lexicon. This Wiktionary note suggests its general meaning or connotation. To delve into this more deeply might require a new mini-essay. But not today.

p.s.: in my "essay" (comprised of tweets) I didn't bother to translate the Bengali utterance Kolkatar Gaan, Kolkatar Pran -- a motto I'd incessantly hear on radio, when living some weeks in Kolkata a dozen years ago. It means: "Calcutta's song(s) / Calcutta's life-breath." (But Sridala prob. didn't need a translation.) For sake of thoroughness, I append this footnote.

________________________

This is my 1st blog post in abt. 20 months.  Glad to be back to Bhairo in the Morning (in the morning). I'll offer hat-tips to Han Shan, Snyder, Watson, Professors Schafer & Strickmann, and 
Sridala Swami -- as well as new Twitter-met acquaintance Joe Lamport -- for spurring this prodigal's return.

Sunday, April 7, 2019

Logging-Out [ghazal]

Simply to be at ease & not in pain   seems such a blessing
Simply to be not wholly down the drain   seems such a blessing

Requisite for accomplishment   is nuts & bolts survival?
Logging-out from concerns of loss & gain   seems such a blessing

Multiple worlds   the tragicomic soul perforce traverses
Knowing how God exists on every plane   seems such a blessing

From the first dawn   far destiny was marked upon my forehead
Feeling at length the marker's darkling stain
                                                                           seems such a blessing

Somebody zoomed to storied heights?   others fell off the radar?
Walking the hushed prosaic earth again   seems such a blessing

Well you might ask that painter Raphael   where did he wander?
Somewhere he's grinding plants for paint:  the twain
                                                                               seem such a blessing

[April 5, 2019]


Saturday, May 20, 2017

Self-birthday Poem [May 20, 2017]

Today I'm sixty-one
the tale's still unfolding
the tangle's not yet done
does strife mellow when olding?
with silence quietly golding
life's joke might prove high fun
punchline not yet beholding
today I'm sixty-one


d.i.  [in Los Angeles]


Saturday, June 4, 2016

A Trio of Digital Incantations (impromptu)


1. Copy & paste

Copy & paste with gluten-free paste!
Pixilate pixilate! hurry in haste!
Answer all questions! if questions are aced
Broadcast your victory!  Copy & paste!


2.  Click here

Click here quickly! thru thick & thin!
Love the alacrity! click & win!
Whether you're worried or eager or sick
Answers are waiting! So click here! Click!


3.  Drowsy browsing?

Drowsy browsing? data arrayed?
Pictures fading? wait in the shade!
When you're offline & far from a phone
Click with your heart!  You're never alone!


d.i.

Saturday, July 11, 2015

A Studio Production (after Silence Day)


Is it invariably Central Casting
(on this quaint side of the Om Point)
that trots out its dramatis personae
all itching to assume angular places
in scenarios cooked up to burst forth
centerstage or out yon in left field

while Peripheral Casting unfolds space
& available light lends a dim metier
time ticking morse code? the hourglass
has been turned & every scintilla
of fine sand fell gravity pulls through
could whisper  time awaits Everyman

and is it then Medial Casting that
behind the scenes with its account books
flipped open to arcane karmic traceries
weighs the possible against its opposite?
do we scurry just to flesh out a plotline
of banality? are miracles permissible?

off the rails unscripted in grand improv
Mr. Whim now raises his megaphone

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Confessions of Happiness [quatrain]

Every day if I should see you becomes a wonderful day any action that involves you brings a blessing to my heart your friendship resembles an inexhaustible treasury whereby day after day tendrils of happiness surround me

Saturday, January 17, 2015

"God is online & offline" [boomerang poem]


God is online & offline
God is beyond lineation
God is without form or sign
God is in all of creation
God is deep-source information
God is top-notch ruby wine
God is the long implication
God is online & offline

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Early Winter Shi


Rainy dark night   but the rain almost done
listening to Beethoven   having arrived
again at the street that I've come to call home
still lingering a while with the radio   I've
along with the brood of companion dropsouls
fetched up once more on the penultimate night
of a year in a still-youthful century whose
real design if half-sensed remains hidden from sight

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Ave Maria Sans Photograph


Gunot's Ave Maria on the radio
Christmas eve again is here
Christ Jesus imagined for ages though
no photo's available where
one might contemplate his visage
while pondering his message


no one texting from the manger
there's no YouTube Magi clip
& what's really rather stranger
Google Maps touched not the trip
there's some post about a star
I can't see it from my car

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

"The rose without its thorn" [sonnet]


The rose without its thorn is not a rose
the heart without its ache is not a heart
the stream's no more a stream unless it flows
the plum's hardly a plum except it's tart


that mirror is a mirror which displays
whatever face or form you place before it
the mirror of the heart likewise arrays
a floral vision when you fetch a floret


the path of love seemed easy   quoth Hafez
at first    until the obstacles kicked in
who hasn't felt the truth in what he says?
who doesn't know the tumult of the spin?


when heart goes reeling in its twirl of trouble
the dream of easy love pops like a bubble

 

"Pomp and Circumstance" [sonnet]


Another day appears in which to love you
another day emerges from the deep
the sky again (that canopy above you)
is ready when you waken from your sleep

the earth beneath is ready for your footfall
the atmosphere awaits to your every word
the field is ready either for your football
or (if you're feathersome) your song O bird!

O bird! O fish! O deer within the thicket!
O heart within the pulchritude of night!
O theatre! we've arrived & here's the ticket!
a thousand times we strive to get it right!

another day (the curtain's now ascending)
I love you! at another poem's ending



"Dumb luck" [a sonnet]


If the purpose of my existence is to love you
is it dumb luck that you've appeared before my eyes?
with rich earth beneath your feet & blue sky above you
do you need dramatics of sunset & sunrise?


there are suns & moons in my heart & many a star
there's a universe that I haven't yet quite explored
I can wend the roads of the world since I've got a car
but what vehicle's apt to plumb the ways of the Lord?


if the heart is the key for walking the path of truth
while yet God's unknown & unknowable! tell me this
if one earnestly seeks to quaff the fountain of youth
is it nonetheless pathetic to think of your kiss?


says an ignorant oaf before the gate of the queen
"though my head be dappled in dust my heart is serene"


Monday, December 8, 2014

The Elements of Attar [sonnet]


If I were to write a poem to celebrate
what delight befills my heart in your gentle gaze
which has thankfully fallen on me in my life late
what materials ought I fetch to construct that praise?


should I travel first to Himalayan heights & pluck
rustic blossoms that shine beyond pedestrian sight?
should I visit next Bhopal lakes where from soft muck
massive lotus-flowers emerge in dawn's gold light?


if I mix the essence of lotus with scent of blooms
from the heights would this suffice? or should I add
subtle tinctures gleaned at a thousand Sufi tombs?
must I hasten to Mehera's garden at Meherazad


for stray petals of roses she nurtured in God's joy?
should I mix in the morning-glories I saw as a boy?

 

Sunday, November 9, 2014

"The art of the quip" [boomerang poem]


Is the art of the quip now an infobahn talent?  I guess
yet its long antecedents trace back  to an ancient salon
picture please Oscar Wilde as Twitterer!  would he express
those incisive bon-mots & touchés  from sundown until dawn?
granting much one espies on the internet  merits a yawn
there's a smidgeon inspiring deep thought (not so fleetingly)  yes? 

on the chessboard of fate   am I cast as a quip-equipped pawn
with the art of the quip now an infobahn talent?  I guess

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Majnun's November Soliloquy [sonnet]


Can I pass a whole week   not seeing mashooq?
how many days flee   without her lilting voice?

O gentle voice   yet puissant & determined
O delicate form   yet strong & curvaceous
 

am I a mere cipher   in her dreamlife equation?
or could I hold for her   the frisson of a lover?
are my warblings too copious?  my hairs too gray?
my poetry too ponderous?  my heart too fraught?
 

do I spawn too many puzzles   all the while destiny
lightly laughs in the face of the cliché of human folly?
do I set myself up   for lugubrious dark footpaths

blindsided by absurdity   & an unrequited love?
 

O does my rhymeless sonnet   lack balance & reason?
so dazed & senseless   in entanglements of ishq

Thursday, October 30, 2014

"Learning to love you" [villanelle]


Am I learning to love you day by day my friend?
might I cherish you in the stillness of my heart?
is our tale of timeless love without an end?


you discovered me by strange happenstance!  we wend
an ineffable circuit   tracing part by part
am I starting to love you day by day my friend?


though my poems be vague & paltry  let me send
darkling ringlets of thought   till ringing words impart
such a tale of timeless love as knows no end


didn't Hafez intone   the heartbreak of the rend?
didn't Rumi each lambent round of longing chart?
am I growing to love you day by day my friend?


when our life meets with signs & portents  that portend
beauty's arrows let loose   like cupid's poison dart
is our tale of timeless love without an end?


in this universe   who'll say what's comin' 'round the bend?
in this dream   who sees what's the horse  & where's the cart?

if I'm learning to love you day by day my friend
could our tale of love flow on without an end?


[line 10: "the rend" = the lover]

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

clueless in paradise [gatha]


Being so simple   I'm easily astonished
being so clueless   I'm handily beguiled
in my defense   (as scriptures have admonished)
paradise comes   when you become a child