Category Archives: Poems

On Alert

I like to be on alert, all my alarms deployed, extended to the point of being spent. Like the day I carried a 2,000 year old vase inside a museum where I worked. Or the day I summoned the courage to hold your hand on that evening stroll.

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The Needles in the Haystack

Great poems deliver a few permanent sentences. Those that sharpen your mind, soften your stands, shake your confidence, double your realm of doubts, and serve you a blow, throwing you backwards, from their intensity. The virtue of scarring your psyche with the spell of words. Some call it magic. Others genius. I think of it as an exhibitionist muse flashing her ankle.

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Preface of Wildflowers

Today, I published my fifth book of poetry. It is a great coincidence that today would have been the 87 Birthday of Sylvia Plath.

Below is the preface of Wildflowers:

Five years ago, I embarked on a journey and a personal commitment to self-publish one book of poetry per year for ten consecutive years. This year marks the mid-point. Over time, I have learned a great deal about the art. I like to think that I have evolved and that my writing has strengthened along the way. My belief that writing poems is a serious business has only deepened.

There is so much that goes into a poem besides the initial spark that inspires the birth of something beautiful in the poet’s head. The initiation indicates a start while its allure, fascination, and breakthrough are encouraging signs to pursue it. The finish line is many drafts away. Like a traveler who endures a long journey before arriving home. Even when at home, another journey starts.

A poem is more like a wedding. The bride has to choose her groom following her heart and be sure about her love for him. Then she spends long days and nights in meticulous planning. At the center of the wedding, there is the newlywed couple celebrating their love, and starting a new beginning. There is great deal of food, drink, and music. Many friends are in attendance including bridesmaids, best men, and guests of honor. All are in their best attire and contribute even so subtly to commemorating this happy occasion. There are the hopeful singles who are looking for love. There is the tipsy uncle who will not follow the carefully rehearsed script from the night before. If we are lucky the best man may spill some beans in his rambling speech after consuming a few drinks. Let’s not forget the mother, her heroic efforts to make this day perfect. I would like to bring your attention especially to the mother as she sheds a few tears when the couple cuts the cake. I like how the mother is never sure that the groom is up to the task of taking good care of her baby girl. I feel the same way about the poet in me.

I look forward to embracing the upcoming five years, hopeful that they may bring gifts bearing promises. Until then, I leave you with these poems of mine. Please be gentle as you converse with them.

Thank you!

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Bending Line

 

I denounce the factory owner for grabbing the land, underpaying for the raw material, and subjecting his employees to longer hours and mediocre conditions. From the third and upper floor of the building adjacent to the factory, he glances briefly at headlines of today's paper. Beneath him, a mob of mid-management awaits new instructions. Ownership has been in the family. Only they can buy and sell. Eager to show utter disregard for anyone else and other ways. He sips his coffee, curses the times, and mocks the news. He gives orders, puffs his pipe, and asks about the deliveries. Every day I rise early, put on my best attire, stand in line at the docks across the fields from his balcony, and I beg for a job.

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Wounded Cheeks

She is among poets a Mozart. Always playful, forever joyful. Beauty not only a virtue, but an end unto itself. Her sensibilities as delicate as a debutante’s cheeks. Her prose shimmers with overflowing ambitions. Her pride dominates the stage, like an aura of grace struggling to hide its confidence. Begging the world to take a seat, not to miss the beginnings, discover stunning revelations. So contagious are her pleas, they require us to register her presence, as they humble her audience. Like the serenity of light, early morning, as it lands on trees and their leaves, Her metaphors standing out the way beautiful domes adorn long stained-glass walls of medieval churches.

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Should I Engage?

Trapped in thoughts like punctuations between sentences.
Yet certain my contributions will clear the air,

invite intriguing conversations with my fellow travelers
on this train ride, during my visit to Morocco, my first home.

They must have guessed I now live abroad,
am an outsider— my Gap shirt is too white.

As if doubly bleached,
plus it stands out in contrast to the colors around.

They will shortly conclude
I reside in an English speaking country,

for I will let escape the inevitable ok, the affirmative yeah,
and the convenient wow as I nod in agreement.

My Mother’s tongue buried deep somewhere.
Despite my careful selection of words,

I struggle to finish a thought.
Rusty as I am, I need warming up.

Outmatched and out of practice;
no matter my precautions, traces of rough

edges float in my speech, a betrayal.
I will come across as calculating, may be preaching.

They will inevitably ask: where are you visiting from?
America— immediately prompting eyebrows to rise.

A vacationer, a gringo. Will they dismiss my ideas?
Or pretend to be impressed?

Not really, they genuinely smile, and flood me with questions.Facebooktwittermail

Four by Four

A puppeteer feels vibration,
echoing from the puppet
as it reacts to the dictated directions.

Mentoring is no different.

*

Claims to being the source of light,
from self-inflated egos,
are felt hardest on other self-inflated egos;

until darkness suffocates all.

*

When a dictator makes light of his ugly self,
or self-deprecates, it does not make him less evil,
and certainly not human.

In suffering, normalization is off-limits.

*

Sadness has enormous rings
that are forever expanding,
easily shared among the miserable.

Pain is contagious.Facebooktwittermail

Forces of Life

Do flowers know when they are dying? The currents when they are flooding. That they will ebb in the afternoon. That it’s all because of the moon. Do flowers know when they are dying? The leaves when they are falling. That they will come back next spring. That signature of what each season must bring. Do flowers know when they are dying? The hot fashions when they are fading. That new ideas will shape the conversation. That innovation empowers the next generation. Do flowers know when they are dying? The empires when they are imploding. That armed forces alone can’t hold them together. That morals of a civilization are their bellwether.

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The Original Apple

I met a muse who was born a goddess. She played down her powers until she met me. She served me eternal wine, promised barrels of honey. The original apple, she said, was mislabeled: a classic case of failed marketing. The apple was nothing but the right breast of Eve, a metaphor lost on uncreative men. And no woman cared to explain.

I hope to meet my heroine among the newcomers, before I deplete my energy or worse yet, stay untapped and left to rust. I will find the biggest forest on the planet, set it on fire, and launch my worries and doubts crashing into its center. My heroine is out there, but I’m not sure where, or which country she belongs to, or what century she comes from. What books have her name? Whether the ocean could preserve our fingerprints.

I plant promises for the music to outdo silence, and for love to outshine the sun. If that is not commitment, the sky must be an illusion. The mountains will need to flatten themselves and absorb their dwellers’ meditations.

My heroine is out there and I swear to furnish the night for her. To serve her the spring on the palms of my long arms. With her grace, we will fill the front pages of newspapers, tap into the talisman’s secret channels, and rearrange the letters of alphabets.

My heroine and I will open a school for lovers, and ask them to dress poets in rare silk, or exotic feathers, from obscure islands; urge them to melt the world’s literature and apply its ink to their eyelashes. In the humanities, a new discipline will be inaugurated.Facebooktwittermail