"The Prophet" By Khalil Gibran

Khalil Gibran

From "The Prophet" By Khalil Gibran

 

Then said Almitra, "Speak to us of Love."

And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said:

When love beckons to you follow him,

Though his ways are hard and steep.

And when his wings enfold you yield to him,

Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

And when he speaks to you believe in him,

Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.

Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,

So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.

He threshes you to make you naked.

He sifts you to free you from your husks.

He grinds you to whiteness.

He kneads you until you are pliant;

And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,

Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,

Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.

Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;

For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, I am in the heart of God."

And think not you can direct the course of love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.

But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:

To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.

To know the pain of too much tenderness.

To be wounded by your own understanding of love;

And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;

To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;

To return home at eventide with gratitude;

And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a

song of praise upon your lips.

Michelle Cahill- Goan-Anglo-Indian

 Michelle Cahill

Michelle Cahill is Goan-Anglo-Indian writer who lives with her family and two minilop rabbits in Sydney. Her poems and short stories have recently appeared in Southerly, Poetry Review (UK), Cordite, Prosopisia and Fox Chase Review (USA).  Vishvarūpa, her most recent collection is published by 5Islands Press. For a sequence of her poems she received the Val Vallis Award, and she was highly commended in the Blake Poetry Prize.

Some of her poems

The Fire Eaters

Agni, did you come from lightning, sticky lava,
from dry, incendiary leaves or the sun’s hot coals?

Long ago, in the middle Pleistocene, our fingers rubbed fire
our compact homo sapien jaws ate warm flesh.

Worshippers, we stood up straight, to grip your spear.
How did we germinate these fields?  Bonfires slaked you,

from the alchemy of brimstone and chalcedony sparks.
So temples shattered, so firearms and explosives broke

the great sleeping Buddhas of Ghandhara. We live in hope—
your seven tongues draw fire, dividing symbiotic flames

from air. Gums blister, lips kiss the burning world
goodbye, high on vapours, on singed skin and keratin.

The centuries drag. Our cartels breach the Orinocco,
the salt domes and Babylonian Mosques, unsympathetic

to prehistoric algae, the plankton time asphyxiates. Viscera
are stripped from tidy fossil beds, our pipelines carve

 your thermal subjects. Nothing much survives: daughters turn
against fathers. Refineries melt, nuclear plants leak

apologetic isotopes. Yet, sunset converts our gestures
to atonement prepared from rice, cow dung, clarified ghee.

And somewhere with Promethean guile, a man wakes his lover
from her apartment as a light snow dusts the city streets.

In his arms, a two-litre soda bottle filled with gasoline,
on the pavement, a dropped cigarette ignites your flint.

Indra’s Net

I have not found your idol in any temple, Lord.
Your one thousand eyes elude me in sleep, your
net of pearls shimmering like pins, a flower sutra.

Yet how the Vedic skies praise your light.
Spear fisherman and hunter, each knot you tie
interweaving memory, a reef with a rosebud.

Bowlines and clove hitches are your fetters, all
the lace and twine of this world, the emptiness
it frames, uncharted. Your past might be a silk road

of gold, hemp, musk, caravans loaded with spice,
slaves traded. In my conjuring there are far colonies,
papyrus treaties, gold coins, pierced and printed

with your cognate deities: Thor of old Norse, Zeus,
whose thunder you whet, Bacchus, the soma-drinking
foreigner. Zoroastrian or Armenian, your polyglot

perplexes linguists with a strange loop of origin.
Like Escher’s Drawing Hands you are a paradox
to muzzle me. Water nymphs grace your cloud court,

a half-horse, a man with a bird’s wing, his fibula
inscribed with runes. Even the jade and dewpond
are small miracles, selfless things inventing selves.

Charles Dickens Weeps for His Last Child

Beyond the coach, the open reaches of the Thames summons
ravens, gulls, otters, and the Sussex docked at Gravesend.

Mothers fiddle with their baskets and bonnets, children herd
cattle and goats, undaunted by din, the rank, soggy earth.

Autumn with her rich unleaving of oak, elm and maple
measures my bleakness. For days the wind has refused to speak.

My youngest, Plorn, waits in a boarding house with his dog,
his armoury of rifles, revolvers, saddles and family portraits

which will decorate the saloon. But when the fiddler plays a shanty,
when the sails are unfurled, the anchor raised out of mud

that other world begins with its nautical discipline. So remote
from landfall or the idleness of London, strange things can happen.

My advice is to write furiously in the evenings as Wilkins Micawber
— while shooting seagulls you may become your own fiction.

I’m fascinated by the arc of falling stars, eclipses, the way words
permit the undertow of shipwreck, gambling, child mortality.

I grieve for this farewell, to which myself is tethered, as letters
tied to pieces of coal are flung aboard a home-bound craft;

the voyage south to Melbourne both searing and cold. How still
the ocean is, a perfect fleet of ships, the distance quite imaginary.


Beauty Tips
                         for my mother
What words to fill the day? How to resist sentiment,
balancing dream and the recklessly blue sky?

Spring arrives with its allegro swell of trees, pollen,
a novel open on the kitchen bench, breakfast aromas.

Outside, the garden languors in laundry, agapanthus,
our swimming pool in need of chlorine turns emerald green

with insect wings, serrated jacaranda. What colour is truth?
I dip the soft sable in powder to dust away speckles,

cover shadows on my face, and yesterday’s mascara.
Cleanse, tone, exfoliate. At all times, brush downwards.

I’ve disregarded my mother’s beauty tips, her lessons
in permanence or grace. Her body slow, involuntary;

her eyes widened by Parkinson’s, a fine tremor in the jaw
while the heart arranges, steady with belief and forgetting.

I take comfort in this. Mother, show me the other way back.
How the gravel is imprinted by the wind, by human steps.
Walk with me this evening, the sky crepuscular, rose-tinted,
the drifting scent of wild freesias like something strange,

half-known. You shuffle, sight weakened, wanting
to observe the fallen shingles, twigs, and the scarcity of birds.

Shuntaro Tanikawa-Japanese poet

Shuntaro Tanikawa

(Japan, 1931) 
 Born in 1931, Tanikawa was a middle-school student at the end of the war. He was just young enough to have been spared the pain and despair experienced by those poets who faced death, loss and devastation during the war. And yet his thoughts were never too far away from death, which was colourlessly woven into his worldview, lending his work philosophical depth.

Following the end of World War Two, a group of young Japanese poets who had survived the battlefield and military oppression were determined to create a new poetry of their own, one which totally negated the poetic conventions and traditions of the pre-war era. Their poetry was characterised by angst, pain and fear, and was overshadowed by death. Out of this poetic movement came a series of anthologies, based on the group’s new poetics. The Waste Land in 1951 was the first of these annual anthologies, which continued to 1958.

In 1952, the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect, marking the end of the Occupation by Allied Forces begun in 1945. Japan was well on the path to recovery from the war’s devastation under its new democratic constitution. Socio-political changes were generating hope and creative energy within society.

It was against this background that Tanikawa launched his career as a fresh voice, set apart from those of the post-World War Two poets, resonating with the spirit of new times. On the occasion of the publication of Tanikawa’s first Collected Poems in 1968, poet and critic Shiro Murano wrote, “Right from the first volume, Alone in Two Billion Light Years, no book of poetry in post-World War Two [Japan] has been as spectacular as Tanikawa’s. It is astounding to see that his poetry is so widely beloved, yet shows absolutely no sign of compromise.” In the decades since, Tanikawa has maintained the position of being the foremost poet in Japan, in terms of both his widely acknowledged artistry and his unprecedented popularity, having garnered a huge following among the general public.

Tanikawa has published over 60 books of poetry, encompassing lyrical poems, analytical prose poems, narrative poems, epic poems, satirical poems and highly experimental poems. In virtually every book of poetry he consciously and artfully adopts a different mode and style and has been at the cutting edge of contemporary Japanese poetry throughout his career. His words are clear, his lines are easy to understand, yet his poetry is highly sophisticated. He says he writes like Beethoven – who was said to have written music through great pain and with considerable effort – and yet makes his lines look as effortless as the work of Mozart, known for the ease with which he could compose. As singer-songwriter Akiko Yano writes: “A very complex wiring is employed, but it’s as if his methods and techniques are all hidden beneath the surface, which is itself fully covered by a pretty stainless material . . . and I think to myself ‘Ah, wouldn’t it be great if I could write a poem like that?’”

Over the years, Tanikawa has been actively involved in poetry readings and has participated in poetry festivals both in Japan and around the world. He has visited all continents except for Antarctica and has collaborated with various international writers, creating linked poems and dialogue poems. His poetry has been widely translated into Mongolian, Korean, Chinese and most Eastern and Western European languages. He has received many awards, recognitions and prizes for his poetry. His work (in Tian Yuan’s translation) was widely praised across China, where it received two awards, of which one was the prestigious Zhongkun International Poetry Award of Beijing University in 2011.

Tanikawa has also been very active in promoting and supporting the translation of other contemporary Japanese poets, helping to make their work available to readers around the world. 

Some of his poems

Self Introduction

I am an old man, short and bald
For over half a century
I have spent my life grappling with words:
nouns, verbs, postpositional particles, question marks and the like
Now I rather prefer silence

I do not dislike mechanical tools
Though I love trees, too, including shrubs
I am not good at remembering their names
I am somewhat indifferent to dates in the past
I harbor antipathy against so-called authority

I am cross-eyed, astigmatic and presbyopic
My house has no Buddhist altar or Shinto shrine, but
I have a gigantic mail box that connects directly to my room
Sleep is a sort of pleasure for me
If I dream, I do not remember it when I awake

All the above are facts, but
once I put them down in words like this, somehow they do not ring true
I have two independent children and four grandchildren, do not keep a cat or a dog
In summer I am in T-shirts most of the time
A price may be paid for the words I write

The River

Earth-colored water hesitates, flows
I realize it is a river
The descendant of formless underground dwellers,
the water is heading toward the sea, that much I know
but I don’t know when and how it welled up

As the train crosses the river a young woman next to me yawns
There is something welling up, too, from the shadowy depth of her mouth
Suddenly I realize my brain is more dull-witted than my flesh

Feeling uneasy that I, the flesh, riding a train,
am made mostly of water
I, the brain, prop myself up with words

Sometime in a distant past, somewhere in a distant place
words were much less voluminous, but
their ties to the nether world were perhaps much stronger

Water remains on this planet
morphing into seas, clouds, rains and ice
Words, too, cling to this planet
morphing into speeches, poems, contracts and treaties

I, too, cling to this planet

To Meet “Me”

Veer off the national highway onto the prefectural road,
turn left again onto a village road and come to the end
“Me” lives there
It’s a “Me” that is not myself

It’s a modest house
a dog barks at me
some vegetables are planted in the yard
As always I sit on the ledge of the house
a cup of roasted-leaf tea is served
no greetings are offered

I was given birth by my mother
“Me” was birthed by my words
Which is the true me?
I am sick and tired of this topic, but
as “Me” suddenly starts to wail
I choke on my tea

The shriveled breasts of a senile Mom
that’s the dead-end of my birthplace,
says “Me”, sobbing terribly
But as I gaze at the daytime moon in silence
it slowly begins to settle in my mind
that the beginning and the end go farther than that

The day has ended
Listening to frogs
we fall asleep in futons placed side by side
both “Me” and I are now

It's morning

First I stretch myself in bed
I rise up in one breath
I go take a pee
I fetch newspapers
I am a miniscule power plant

The power of dry leaves falling
The power of tears from a fussing child
The power of the resonance of a Jews’ harp moving away
The power of casually placed punctuation
The power of Good Morning!

An invisible matrix
unites miniscule powers
I am one of its joints, too
A globe is placed on the table
I try to stare down the Earth

I drink a glass of carrot juice
I turn on my desktop computer
I sit unfocused for a little while
Unexpected words come to me
like water bubbles, like now