Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

3 Poems about 1 Phenomenal President

1/6/2017

“Poetry empowers the simplest of lives to confront the most extreme sorrows with courage, and motivates the mightiest of offices to humbly heed lessons in compassion.” Postered Poetics by Aberjhani.

In the debate over the potential repeal of the American Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, mainstream media commentators commonly refer to the law as President Barack Obama’s “signature achievement.” Whether you describe that tendency as guerrilla decontextualization or simple disrespect, it mostly adds up to a miscalculation of the assessment of President Obama’s impact on American and world history.

Said assessment is one which historians will be determining for decades, but for now, by way of introducing the 3 poems that will soon follow, it is enough to note that the American Care Act is only one of many key achievements spearheaded by Mr. Obama on behalf of his American constituents and his fellow leaders in the global community. How is it commentators so easily overlook the fact that under his leadership a downward spiraling recession which nearly brought the country to its red, white and blue knees was effectively strategically reversed, dropping unemployment figures from double digits to when he took office to the current figure below 5 percent? How can they so casually forget that his accomplishments earned him the Nobel Prize for Peace?

Historic 2009 Black History Month American Legacy Magazine cover by artist Allan Burch featuring President Barack H. Obama (center), and pictured in the background starting from the left going clockwise: Malcolm X, Mary McLeod Bethune, Frederick Douglass, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Original source: http://allanburch.blogspot.com/2009/02/barack-obama-for-american-legacy.html

That he became the United States’ first African-American president at the age of 47 is possibly less remarkable than the full two terms during which one generation was born, and another grew into maturity living without the assumption that a black American president––this one accompanied by First Lady Michelle Obama and their two daughters–– was by default an anomaly. The observation is more than just the most commanding fact to cite for Black History Month every year from this point onward. It is one of the most compelling arguments for ramping up improved lessons worldwide in diversity, cultural literacy, and peaceful coexistence.

Add to the above the skillful application of leadership principles employed by Mr. Obama to repair diplomatic abroad and whether storms of race-fueled violence at home. Look closely at the risks he took in effort to achieve a diverse workforce with appointments of women, gays, Latinos, Asians, and African Americans to influential offices. And although he obviously boasted a bit when it came to his role as Commander-in-Chief, he was amazingly effective in his position as Chief Comforter following some of the most horrendous natural and man-inflicted disasters in history.

Of the poems below, the first was written to commemorate Barack Obama’s historic 2008 election to the presidency. The second and third were written as it became apparent that his presidency was going to meet with serious oppositions of every kind: political, racial, personal, military, betrays, and more. Each of the poems are available in the pages of The River of Winged Dreams.

Hope and Audacity Revisited

The poem titled “There Upon a Bough of Hope and Audacity” was first published in The Savannah Herald after Barack Obama’s first election to the U.S. presidency. Ironically enough, the poem proposed that Mr. Obama was not to be compared to the great Abraham Lincoln, and yet one of the more noted responses to his re-election in 2012 was a challenge much like one Mr. Lincoln faced a century and a half ago. It was the challenge, whether symbolic or literal, of a growing call for different states to secede from the U.S. President Obama’s re-election was by no means a given. The battle to win was as epic a political struggle as America has ever seen, but U.S. citizens in the end made their choice clear:

There Upon a Bough of Hope and Audacity by Aberjhani originally published in the Savannah Herald to commemorate Barack Hussein Obama's first presidential inauguration.

Songbird of speckled feathers and new millennium eyes,
you trill notes of democratic vistas heavy with light.
Chords of miraculous notions enrich your blessed voice
with power to sing dreams into deeds well done.

Above your head Sallie Hemings’ children laugh rainbows.

You are neither Christ nor King nor Lincoln.
But what you are is willing, capable, and sincere,
there upon a bough of hope and audacity
as branded by history as any have ever been.

Knights of global tables toast the lyrics of your vision.

A grand son of two continents, your heart marches
to the glorious world beat of universal drummers,
and your American dream dutifully follows: one step
for peace, another for justice, two more for strength.

Harriet Tubman’s tears splash prayers for your success.

From where you perch, the trade winds of destiny
lift your songs like leaves of silken prophecies,
scattering the soft true gold of their melodies and joy:
to their rhythm a world sways, hums, and dares to believe.

(from The River of Winged Dreams)

Angel of Hope’s Persistent Flight

“To continue one’s journey in the darkness with one’s footsteps guided by the illumination of remembered radiance is to know courage of a peculiar kind––the courage to demand that light continue to be light even in the surrounding darkness.”
--Howard Thurman

I.
Wreaths of nuclear ash
decorate civilian hearts
with unresolved blood.

Greed, crowned emperor,
rules the earth with cold disdain
for harmony’s path.

War poisons the land
like diseased minds downloaded
into bowls of tears.

Chaos, loving none
so much as itself, slurps and
spits dead souls like bones.

What is belief now?
What is faith that will not die?
What news from heaven?

II.
In midnight’s orchard
rose’s blossom the secrets
that heal daylight’s wounds.

Beats of broken hearts
flow waves of revelation––
open gates to strength.

Cradled in scorched arms,
a soldier’s moon keeps its vows––
shines persistent hope.

This love that God is
curves in figure eights greater
than both time and space.

Death wins nothing here,
gnawing wings that amputate––
then spread, lift up, fly.
(from The River of Winged Dreams)

(Postered Poetics title art graphic for Midnight Flight of the Poetry Angels by Aberjhani.)

“It was a savage scene, and we stayed there for a long time, watching life feed on itself, the silence interrupted only by the crack of bone or the rush of wind, or the hard thump of a vulture’s wings as it strained to lift itself into the current, until it finally found the higher air and those long and graceful wings became motionless and still like the rest.”
––Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father

What once was blood streaks
your face with indigo tears
and lush midnight tunes.

Holding silver hands,
you compose a Tao of art
that heals broken wings.

Lips glow violet,
open to reveal tongues bright
with pearl metaphors.

A speckled halo
handcuffs the world’s best liars
to soft dark passions.

Music’s sweet labors
give birth to a springtime rush
of sighs rippling dreams.

Out of your mouth rhymes
blossom like warm paradigms
already in flight.

Golden, your songs,
and noble; spinning stars on
their axis of love.

On faith’s battered back
calm eyes etch prayers that cool
a nation’s hot rage.

Inside these scarred hearts
genius flows incandescent
waves of truth made real.

Hope drowned in shadows
emerges fiercely splendid––
boldly angelic.
(The River of Winged Dreams)

From the History Channel: “The 44th President: In His Own Words”

Author-Poet Aberjhani is currently completing a collection of nonfiction narratives on the cultural arts, history, race relations, literature, and social and political conditions in Savannah, Georgia (USA).

Bright Skylark Literary Productions
© 9 January, 2017

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Sustaining the Sweet Joyful Howl of Poetry in the 21st Century

4/3/2016

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“Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives.” --Aberjhani from Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays. ©Postered Poetics based on original poetry Spencerian calligraphy art by G.A. Gaskell. #NPM16 #PocketPoem

The launch of National Poetry Month, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, in April 1996, came just three years after the debut issue of the Savannah Literary Journal in 1993. In addition to 49 poems by 35 brilliant writers with regional and national reputations, the 1996 edition of the journal featured six works of fiction and three pieces of creative nonfiction.

My contribution to the journal that year was a personal essay but the title of it, Angels and Shakespeare (later published in I Made My Boy Out of Poetry), revealed the central place verse has always held in my life. So did this epigraph borrowed from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda:

“For this reason Monday burns like
oil... and it howls in passing like a
wounded wheel...”

(Pablo Neruda, from Walking Around)

Both National Poetry Month and the publication of the journal (up until 2001) could be considered as invitations to readers, writers, and publishers to explore a more deeply intimate relationship with language. These invitations coaxed them as well to experience the different levels of power words can wield when endowing our lives with either newly-claimed or wholly-unexpected meaning.

The responses, now 20 years down the timeline, have mushroomed into a worldwide cultural mainstay where National Poetry Month (NPM) is concerned. In regard to the Savannah Literary Journal, published by the former Savannah Writers Workshop, it has confirmed the value of one of the city’s most prized artistic legacies.

Of Bloggers and Nobel Laureates

But what should we say of poetry as a whole during the last two decades when life as so many once knew it shape-shifted into a spinning mass of digital signals, globalized communities unbounded by geographic borders, and astounding varieties of terror clashing head-on with determined demands for liberty?

Former Poetry Society of Georgia member Gerald Chan Sieg (1909-2005) receiving the Savannah Literary Journal Irene Tromble McAlister Literary Prize from editor Robert Keber in 1999. (photo Bright Skylark Literary Productions Collection)

That now populous demographic of humanity known as bloggers did not exist in 1996 and programmer Peter Merholz would not condense the term “weblog” to invent the word “blog” until 1999. Nevertheless, poetically-inclined bloggers during the first and second decades of this 21st century have done a great deal to ensure poetry occupies a prominent position within the global imagination and humanity’s collective ethical consciousness.

Moreover, the ever-mindful Nobel Prize Committee actually saw fit in 1996 to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality." And in 2011 it bestowed that same honor upon Sweden’s Tomas Tranströmer , "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality."

A Movement Designed to Inspire

Obviously the Academy of American Poets’ commitment to recognizing, honoring, and documenting literary excellence within the work of American Poets did not begin with the establishment of NPM. That happened back in 1934 when founder Marie Bullock surveyed America’s literary landscape and came to a certain conclusion.

Despite the quietly-evolving cultural canonization at the time of such poets as Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Jean Toomer (1894-1967), Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), and other American quill-masters of the period, it became apparent that more needed to be done to place poetry on some level of esteem comparable to what it stirred in the literary capitals—such as Paris, London, and Dublin––of Europe.

National Poetry Month more than half a century later represented a game-changing upgrade from previous efforts. Since its start, affiliated programs each successive year have helped observations to grow in scope and influence. Initiatives such as Poem in Your Pocket Day (observed this year on April 21), the Dear Poet Project, and Poem-A-Day (via email) contribute immensely to sustaining the sweet joyful howl of poetry in these new millennial times. The key words and hashtags that dominate social media every April––like #npm16, #pocketpoem, #jazzpoetry, #celebratingpoetry, and the tagged names of favorite poets––denote only one small measure of how successful the campaign has become.

Cover of Academy of American Poets Journal Vol 50 NPM16. “Greens, Biopsy 2” Digital C Print 2007 by artist Yedda Morrison.

It also did not hurt when citizens of the United States elected a lover and writer of poetry, Barack H. Obama, as their first African-American president in 2008. The following is from a 2009 essay written to commemorate both NPM and Jazz Appreciation Month:

…The birth of the Academy meant the birth of a movement designed to inspire, cultivate, and preserve the voice of American poets. And although it likely was not his intention to do so, President Barack Obama extended that movement not only by bearing the “stigma” of being an accomplished wordsmith but by inviting Elizabeth Alexander––an author of several books but of whom many had never heard until Obama spoke her name––to serve as his Inauguration Day poet.

(Aberjhani, from All that National Poetry Month Jazz)

If there is one thing populations of the world have needed, and received, from poetry for the past two decades, it has been inspiration. But not only inspiration in that classic form which reaffirms the value of faith.

Poetry in our post 9/11 era provides the kind of inspiration that defiantly raises poets’ voices against the brutalities of war, the insanities of terrorism, and the indignities of oppression in all its toxic forms. It empowers the simplest of lives to confront the most extreme sorrows with courage, and motivates the mightiest of offices to humbly heed lessons in compassion.

Although the last edition (to date) of the Savannah Literary Journal was published in 2001, its legacy continues to stand as a richly inspiring one. Many of the poets, essayists, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers featured in its pages have since gone on to win national and international acclaim in various fields. These are but a few listed in no particular order: Janice Daugharty, Linda Rocheleau, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, David C. Hightower, Susan Johnson, Lily Keber, Ja A. Jahannes (1942 -2015), Errol Miller, Kathleen Thompson, Toussaint St. Negritude, Dufflyn Lammers, Anis Mojgani, and Vaughnette Goode-Walker. Again, these represent only a few.

Most would probably tell you their greatest contributions to the literary arts thus far have not been particular poems or stories or books. They have instead been the relationships cultivated with the hearts and souls who heard what they had to say and then drew from that hearing enough motivation to speak their own truths to power and pain and joy.

Despite the Cacophony

Whether through contributors to literary journals, the sustained dedicated efforts of members of the Academy of American Poets, or bloggers content just to have a platform where they could post lines at will, poetry has maintained a dynamic living breathing presence in the world.

Despite the cacophony of bombs and bullets which so often drown out the music of laughter (or possibly because of them) poetry at this point in history may very well be more commanding than any other previous time. There are many reasons to believe its potency, and its beauty, shall grow even stronger in the future.

Aberjhani
© National Poetry Month 2016
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

2016 National Poetry Month poster featuring a florilegium with text excerpted from poems by diverse classic and contemporary poets. The poster was designed by Debbie Millman and produced by Emily Weiland. NPM16

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Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

3/9/2016

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Title graphic with image of French artist Claude Monet's 1890 painting "Champ d'avoine" (Oat Field) in background at the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia. (photograph by Aberjhani)

When the doors of the Jepson Center for the Arts opened to the public in Savannah, Georgia’s, downtown Historic District on March 10, 2006, it served as one more important reminder that the city is much more than a time-capsule filled with unique Civil War memorabilia. It is also home to many creative progressive thinkers eager to see a more sensible social and political balance than those presently evident.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the most avant garde facility within the complex of the Telfair Arts Academy museums. The Center’s cultural and educational value to Savannah since its opening has been demonstrated many times over. It proved especially momentous to this author personally when the publication launch for ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love (co-created with artist Luther E. Vann) sponsored by the Friends of African-American Arts, was held there May 29, 2008.

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

The following year I returned to the center on March 22 with the intention of reporting on an exciting multi-media event taking place there. It featured a group of visual artists referred to as the Creative Force Artist Collective creating abstract paintings and sculpture while jazz saxophonist Jody Espina performed with a live band and audience members danced to the free-flowing vibes. The energy was so intense that I stopped jotting the notes I had been taking to write my story. Instead, my pen joined in with the flying paintbrushes, wailing music, and dancing souls by spontaneously writing the poem titled “Sounds Scribbled Mixed-Media Platinum at the Jepson Center 3/22/09.” The following is an excerpt:

A man sitting monkey-like
on the rooftop of his brain
calculating the precision
with which sunbeams
seduce moonlight
is only as spectacular maybe
as a river passably scatting
red-wine imitations of Louis or Ella.

But a man leaning un-harnessed
over the blue-diamond cliffs
of his jazz-baptized soul
as he weaves southern adagios
and spur-of-the-moment riffs
into new millennium bebop Mozart suites
makes for a different order of musical flora:
worthy of sonic revelations painted abstract divine.

––Aberjhani (excerpt from Sounds Scribbled Mixed-Media Platinum at the Jepson Center)

The complete poem was later published in The River of Winged Dreams. For me, the event that inspired it and the poem itself came to symbolize one of the ways that the Jepson Center for the Arts had come to exert a powerful regenerative influence on the city’s evolving cultural identity.

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

Flashing forward to January 2016: I took a trip to the Telfair Museum of Art and Jepson Center for the Arts to conduct some field research for my current book-in-progress. The first surprise as I walked through Telfair Square toward the Telfair was discovering that it undergoing heavy-duty maintenance and repairs. The building was surrounded by scaffolding and the museum’s iconic trademark statues were sheathed in plastic. It would seem administrators wanted the senior museum at its best in time for the younger gallery’s birthday.

The Telfair Museum (as seen from Telfair Square in Savannah) undergoing repairs and maintenance in early 2016. (photograph by Aberjhani)

Inside the Jepson, I was fully prepared for the splendor that greeted me as I viewed the Monet and American Impressionism exhibit in the Steward Galleries. Given the combination of how French artist Claude Monet’s (1840-1926) singular brilliance had defined, and transcended, an entire era in art history so powerfully that its impact was celebrated in the Southeastern United States two centuries later, breathtaking splendor was about the only thing anyone could have expected. What I had not been prepared for were two different but equally-stunning exhibits in the form of photographs by Jack Leigh and the captivating oversized collage canvases of Mickalene Thomas.

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Readers of the book The American Poet Who Went Home Again know that I had the great honor calling John David "Jack" Leigh II (1942–2004) my friend. He was one of those to whom the book was dedicated and also the subject of the essay titled Bound Moments: Jack Leigh’s Beautiful Southern Adventures. To this day, I still find myself fascinated by the story of how he evolved from a disciplined athlete into an inspired photographer:

“…That was my secret life, my night life. My real life was playing football and being an all-American kid and doing things that fulfilled the image of a young southern boy. The art aspect remained a latent dream but it did guide me to where I was going.”

– (from The American Poet Who Went Home Again)

In truth, I had forgotten that he spent time documenting the construction of the Jepson and turned the labors of its creation into printed black and white art. Jack Leigh was a master at extracting beauty from the mundane and framing the ordinary within angles that revealed the extra-ordinary. His “Building the Jepson Series” of photographs were not in an exhibit room on the day I visited but lined along the hallway walls leading to and from the second-floor elevator, where they were sure to capture the attention of anyone walking that way.

It was fitting that I should have encountered Jack here because one of our last recorded interviews had been about The Land I’m Bound To (2000), a 25-year retrospective of his work at the Telfair commemorating W.W. Norton’s publication of his book of the same title.

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The inclusion of the Mickalene Thomas at Giverny exhibition across the hall, in the Levitt and Varnedoe Gallery, from the Monet paintings in the Steward Galleries deftly demonstrated art’s capacity to transcend boundaries and connect diverse human stories. It also highlighted the artist Mickalene Thomas’s passion for honoring beauty in classic and innovative settings with stringently-applied standards and techniques.

Mounted video of artist Mickalene Thomas, whose work was on display at the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia, at the same time as French artist Claude Monet’s. (photo by Aberjhani)

Few might imagine that a 21st-century African-American woman artist would find as much inspiration and motivation as Thomas apparently did during her stay at the 19th-century French artist Monet’s famous home. But they would discover, eventually, that the discourse sustained through her visual and verbal meditations on the impact of Monet’s aesthetic standards is an important one elevating both discussions on contemporary art and (some would argue) the quality of it.

Thomas’s supersized canvases of reclining Black Women in juxtaposition to her studied interpretations of Monet’s home present beauty, tradition, and intellectual daring as self-defining aesthetics in and of themselves. To walk into a gallery and suddenly view Mickalene Thomas’s depictions of Black Women in particular is a psychologically jarring experience. For African Americans in particular, a chasm of divided awareness can crack open and you find yourself inside shaded regions simultaneously celebrating triumphant legacies of the past and mourning destructions of Black Life and Beauty in the present.

The Promise

With the range of creative talents that have been able to find expression and representation at the Jepson Center for the Arts since 2006, any and all tributes in honor of that fact are fully appropriate. And yet, more exciting than what the facility’s administrators, docents, patrons, and visitors have accomplished thus far is the promise of what may yet be accomplished in the years to come.

Aberjhani
© 3/9/2015
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

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Calligraphy of Intimacy: World Poetry Day 2014

3/20/2014

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One need not, after all, call oneself an artist in order to embrace either the beauty that roses give to the world or the genius that one’s love does. (Aberjhani)

I. ENCOUNTER WITH BEAUTY

When viewing a recent untitled painting by Dublin artist Jaanika Talts a strange thought came to me. It was this: Between the elegant reach of an artist’s color-stained fingers toward her canvas and the haunted explosion of a soldier’s bullet inside his brother’s chest, somewhere a terrified soul is seeking shelter inside the warmth of a stranger’s voice, or an infant is squealing at the incomprehensible delight of discovering it is alive.

As I said, it was a strange thought.

Talts’ painting depicts a cluster of multi-colored roses in different stages of blossoming, nestled against the flesh of dark green leaves and framed by deep brooding shades of emerald, bronze, gold, ruby, and amethyst. There is no description (please see comments below) of the medium but it appears to be mixed acrylic and might include photography as well as an actual rose or two.

The painting caught my attention only partly because it was accompanied by this quote: “Beauty will snatch us by the heart and love us until we are raw with understanding.” The words come from the poem “Calligraphy of Intimacy,” first published in 1996 in a small press magazine called Out of the Blue and later in the book I Made My Boy Out of Poetry. But the image drew my gaze mostly because it was something new from Ms. Talts and then because of what struck me as a sustained tension between persistent beauty and grace asserting itself while under fire.

II. THE POEM

The poem “Calligraphy of Intimacy” is about how relationships anchored in mutual need and affection sometimes turn unexpectedly into battlefields. The relationship might be between two people or two nations, two dreams or two cultures. At their core, they are defined by a gravitational pull toward the best within each other but superficial externals repeatedly block or sever their connection. That could, in many ways, describe the international community’s centuries-year-old waltz with peace and non-peace, and it consequently makes this poem a good one to share for World Poetry Day (March 21) and National Poetry Month (April) 2014:

Calligraphy of Intimacy

Perhaps one day our togetherness
will resemble the calligraphic design
of the letters that spell Abd Al-Jami,
a name denoting beauty: both inside and out.

Like the Arabic character alif
curving its loveliness towards
the end of a numinous breath
you will wander towards an unseen mountain,
re-emerging into life by way of bazaars
in Morocco. Or cafes in Paris.
While I nurse sand dunes and canyons,
shaking with the delicious certainty
that your wanderings and mine
will soon converge, and lock, in the hair
and screaming of the same urgent fire.

Like the seductive lines and silences
of Islamic calligraphy we will bow
and clash three thousand swords.
Or disappear between the warm shadows
of hands, whispers and kissing
disguised and protected by the shields of art.

Out of the canvas of our passion confusion
will rise up, blinding those too curious
about who we are. Or what we do.
Beauty will snatch us by the heart
and love us until we are raw with understanding.
Like two well-paid royal scribes we will let our
hands explain each other to each other and learn
at last to comprehend this calligraphy called intimacy.

            (from I Made My Boy Out of Poetry by Aberjhani)

III. STARTLING SPLENDOR

Some may recall that when writing about Talts’ art in Sensualized Transcendence, I described her two dominant styles as emergent expressionism and transformative impressionism :

If emergent expressionism lends chromatic form and substance to in-between states of metamorphosis, then transformative impressionism may be described as endowing such stages of transition with metaphorical narrative. (from Sensualized Transcendence: Editorial and Poem on the Art of Jaanika Talts)

Those qualities, along with the artist’s penchant for juxtapositions of unpredictable colors, remain evident in the new canvas. At first glance, the flowers almost appear to be trapped in a net of barely-visible anguish. Then take a second look and they could be resting inside a cosmic field of painted ecstasy, quietly breathing in the profound joys and smoldering sorrows that give them their startling splendor.

As over-the-top as the above statement might sound to certain ears, it is no more so than the events and circumstances that have come to shade the character of the year 2014 thus far. On the day that I became aware of the painting, the mystery of Malaysia’s Flight MH370 had just grown considerably deeper, Russia’s military presence in Crimea had become more unsettling, and the Syrian landscape continued to overflow with blood as the region headed into the fourth year of its civil war.

In fact, the previously-noted concepts of persistent beauty and grace asserting itself while under fire could serve as apt descriptions of how Earth continues to spin and dance through the cosmos while humanity carries on with struggles to give a living functional meaning to the word Love.

At any moment within any hour or day or week or year, we are positioned between opportunities to affirm beauty and wonder in the world, and opportunities to assist in humanity’s needless destruction. Some might argue that the latter is not an opportunity at all but an unfortunate faith in self-annihilation and a dangerously macabre addiction to toxic nightmares. One need not, after all, call oneself an artist in order to embrace either the beauty that roses give to the world or the genius that one’s love does. You only need to allow it, and yourself, the respect and chance they deserve.

by Aberjhani
World Poetry Day 2014

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A 2013 Poetry Fantasy on Rumi’s 806th Birthday

9/30/2013

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“We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute
of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.”

--Jalal al-Din Rumi (as interpreted by Coleman Barks in The Essential Rumi)

War is an addiction to chaos that shreds human souls into tattered rags of trauma. In acknowledgement of Rumi’s 806th birthday, I’m all for Syria, Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, and all other countries and organizations at war with each other to exchange their guns and bombs for poems by Mevlana. Replace tanks and drones with open mics and let everyone brave enough go at it. Whoever spits the most verses, quatrains, long poems, or quotes by Rumi wins the right to proclaim peace and throw a feast in honor of sanity, brotherhood, sisterhood, and childhood.

Is that likely to happen? No, not very, but the ecstatic beauty and soulful grace of Rumi’s poetry inspires human hearts to believe in possibilities beyond the predictably fatal. So does the Herculean effort it took for him to produce the works for which the world now reveres him: the ever-astonishing Masnavi, his discourses, the Divan of Shams of Tabriz, and various letters and sermons.

Portrait of Jalal al-Din Rumi by Haydar Hatemi.

As one of his most celebrated translators, Coleman Barks, has noted with amazement, Rumi seems to have composed no less than a dozen poems every single day for the final 12 years of his extraordinary life. Within that incandescent corpus are works that address nearly aspect of what it means to be human and what it could mean to embrace life with a sense of divine co-creation. This last idea, in modern terms, is much less mystical than some might think when considering the environmentalist concept of people as stewards of the earth rather abusers of it. (continues below after video)

Rumi’s legacy is one of many that remind us there are options to giving violence control over our individual and collective destinies. Moreover, life- and history-altering transformations can take place when we least expect them to occur. One such transformation in Rumi’s life was when he met Shams of Tabriz, the man whose influence is generally cited as the catalyst that caused Rumi to evolve into a whirling light of divinely-inspired creative genius. For those who daily discover and rediscover his work, it sometimes happens with the sudden realization that the idea of “us versus them” may be less accurate––and far less important–– than the idea that not only are “we also them” but “they are also us.”

by Aberjhani
Sept 30, 2013

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<<Previous

3 Poems about 1 Phenomenal President

Hope and Audacity Revisited

Angel of Hope’s Persistent Flight

From the History Channel: “The 44th President: In His Own Words”

Sustaining the Sweet Joyful Howl of Poetry in the 21st Century

Of Bloggers and Nobel Laureates

A Movement Designed to Inspire

Despite the Cacophony

Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The Promise

Calligraphy of Intimacy: World Poetry Day 2014

A 2013 Poetry Fantasy on Rumi’s 806th Birthday

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

3 Poems about 1 Phenomenal President

Hope and Audacity Revisited

Angel of Hope’s Persistent Flight

From the History Channel: “The 44th President: In His Own Words”

Sustaining the Sweet Joyful Howl of Poetry in the 21st Century

Of Bloggers and Nobel Laureates

A Movement Designed to Inspire

Despite the Cacophony

Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine​

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company​

The Evolution ofPhotographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty ​

The Promise​

Calligraphy of Intimacy: World Poetry Day 2014

A 2013 Poetry Fantasy on Rumi’s 806th Birthday

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The Promise