The dough is molten at oven spring,
like a prayer to the historicity of things ..

Have we not imagined yesterdays
in the ritual of bread ? While our pasts

lay embezzled, on the tongues of men, the
sentiment of centuries colluded in germ,

echoing through heirloom remembrances
those floury philosophies of change.

While I stretch dough to gaze past
a windowpane, as far back as Khorasan ..

they were other names then, another
elasticity in time. Faith is a memory

of settled people in lands of milk and
honey, where every drought, every flood

spawns a new religion .. and the wheat,
always begs the same old question:

Are we there yet, in the fertile crescent
of opportunity ? The grains haven't changed

in their stolid countenance - long, subtle,
germy, cosseted. In the granaries of kings ..

they are willed by royal decree, never to die
in an eternal future and like humankind,

who score bread in the cuneiform of hearts,
grain is always thirsting to seed the land.

Yesterday, a cloud burst in mythologies
and the rain fidgeted over the retreat

of a tidal pantheon; deities swept away
by a current, and we stood awhile, watching

the moon elbow out the dusk. Breathing
is burdensome when cars float on water

and corpses leak out of cavernous
basements. Every tablet, etched, in the cold

heart of building code was read again
and then again. It wasn't enough to blame

Aeolian whim or the raging riposte of Apollo,
now that we had marvelled away Gaia's

ozone skirt. Her amnion always leaked
in folkloric floods each time she birthed

a parable. She once asked Noah to build
an ark so he could ride her waves

and we scrape the sky to impale her
in shards where her womb is soft and yielding,

as we sour the air and burn the water and strip
her of her emerald sigh and melt her hills

and silt her wetlands. Mostly it was the asphalt
plastering her yearning that calcified her veins

and arteries, as she died slowly under our feet.
We could hardly fathom her sorrow for the tears

rolled off her torso like an oil slick
and rode far into the subway for sewers.

An evening set in metered rhyme,
of pinecones, gainfully bracted
in the manner of spiralling time.

No perfect measure yields a woody cone
although conifer strobilus gilded ratio makes.
The standard mesh of numbers alone

symbolise a hope that a glorious God
assembled in a perfect factory line,
this defiant change to perfectly flawed.

Saying Grace

The day roped in happiness
like tidal waters
streaked with seaweed,
joyous to be afloat again.
The rocky inlet imbued
a stony demeanour, while
calmly contemplating
the resounding consonants
of a cavern within.
I could hear it swish syllables
as it lapped in the waves,
and I now channel
in gratitude,
that exuberant overflow,
and this,
which needs no rationale.
As we sit at a table,
enjoying a meal
cobbled together
from the sweet of corn,
the crunch of lettuce,
the ocean yield
of Piscean gleam,
it has begun to look
like Eden on a plate,
and I allow myself
to feel touched.
I am touched.
Gratitude is a verb
when I feel thankful
for being able to share
in the sacrificial generosity
of plants and animals.
Do we feel blessed?
We must,
for what could be sweeter
than that
we haven't been refused
- a share
of the Universal largesse.
From this bounty,
we take as we may,
so we simply survive
to another day.
It is wonderful to be alive
and I am grateful.
We are grateful.

In Parsley, a Levantine munificence accreted together in Tabbouleh,
herbage that covers fractured bedrock in a poultice of healing.

Secreted within, lie igneous outpourings of bloodied tomatoes,
those solid affections that had welled through an ocean floor

as Neptune quelled Gaia's contractions, her waters seeking to burst
beneath the wrinkled surface of a salty sea. She, an underbelly of sky,
  
pregnant in the overwhelm of magma, sweating out her heart in fire,
muted like a moon of Neptune, in his retrograde soliloquies, yet mirroring

hers in icy resurfacings of skin. The God of the Sea,  boils an amnion  
to hazy mists, how deep will his trident plunge to dislodge those Trojan ships

of deceptions ? Yet, Triton blows a conch for Gaia, not for man's duelling
and his warring tribes. He soothes her feverish gnashing of thighs

labouring continents. Some fires burn in water, like desultory heartbeats
moving the pace of rocks through the ocean floor, spiriting away

to stranger places still, marking maps of memories in the beauty of
a stillborn magma. The limestone they say is no blood relation to such

alien fructification, those oceanic intruders, bleeding still, spilling
secrets in reds and purples. The acid tears spilled in lemons merely

neutralised in syllables, sedimented to a community of  limestone,
that possess no archaic remnants reminiscing through dead bones,

an age of glory. Now beauty lies in herbage over once raucous magma
and traces of a salty sea, freshness of life trailing her veins, in fragrance of Parsley

Sweet Angelica,
An overwhelm of your leafy
ramifications, waxed verdure
affections for a wayward wind.
My eyes caught the emerald glint;
now they glisten green
in a poetic apotheosis.

Should I deem you guilty
that 'twas the devil's walking stick
that sired you,
as virid envelope,
so delicate that every leaflet
would blend to a fine herb repast.

So I brave your prickly defences
in my manner of white tailed deer
and nibble of your leafy poetry.
A half mouthed curse that you sting
but your arbour rose
where none grew and I thought
you bloomed especially for me.

Rhizomes spiralled for life,
and the taste of muddied rain.
Other wanderers tried pillage
those jejune early fronds and
you recoiled in thorny armament,
a conflicted poetry I read on you.

Look at you now ...
largest leaf than any other in a North wind,
towering panicles that draw
a chorus of winged angels, quills.
These be the battlements of love
that will shed for life, in beauty

for when Summer leaves, there'll be Fall,
then the long rest of seasons.

The soul must be a tuning fork,
for the pandemic flit past in a vibration.
Then all is still when the light gets the eyes
and the heart can define radiance,
simply in the clarity of lines and form.

The poetry of pathos is an epic elegy,
and of happiness, a paean to a heart beat.
A hive mind stilled to a limpid pool of reflection,
and a pall lifts, like the sun rises on glass held
in bezels of steel, on girders of strength.

Adored, blessed, loved, as clear as the day
is green. Time can be a blur in a cloudy soul
catharsis but the blue is simply sky, and
a warm heart's the colour of light. Structure
has wheels that are meant to turn.

She's risen coarse on rusted tracks,
through sandy loam, a summer sheen.
Rainbows are but colour barracks,
fair violet, through verdant green.

Through sandy loam, a summer sheen
sparked exile of Fall's fleeting mist.
Fair violet, through verdant green,
adds tint to sun in pigment grist.

Exile sparked in Fall's fleeting mist,
cleared light, silky ivory.
Adds tint to sun in pigment grist,
silhouette of this noble tree.

Cleared light, silky ivory
are petals cast in modest mould.
Silhouette of this noble tree,
tattered leaves, raging wind unfold.

Petals cast in a modest mould
are magi of summer solstice.
Tattered leaves, raging wind unfold
simply envy of breezy fleece.

Magi of the summer solstice,
Purple blush on sun dipped petals.
Raging envy of breezy fleece,
Scalding wind that scarcely settles.

Purple blush on sun dipped petals
Rainbows are but colour barracks.
Scalding wind that scarcely settles,
she rises coarse on rusted tracks.

Blessed are the poorly, for theirs is the kingdom of mudflats

The dispirited streak turgid waters
sinuously, through unsettled feelings
in the wake of boats shedding
filaments of fuel,
sheen on a turbid infusion
and the cordgrass nods a resilience
or an apathy as the silt settles
on their Piscean gleam

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see a salted heaven

Angelic Menhaden of the Atlantic,
are silvery stretches of scale,
dulled in death under a festering sun
and the retreating tide of dying waters
brined in ocean, freshwater spirited
to secret spaces, some dammed crevasse,
now  tumultuous  fate in a salted heaven

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be filled

At the Tabgha of this intertidal palette
Cattails whisper beatitudes
latched onto the tails of wind gusts
and the plovers descended
in a litany of  bird song
amassed like the manna
trailing  tidal waters
as the sea swallows herself.
Blessed are the herons, the mallards,
the geese. Time is measured
in the passage of fish that
cycle themselves through the innards of birds

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the rocks

The meek Menhaden, leaped
onto the rocks that hemmed the inlet,
escaping the hungry habits of herons.
They inherited Earth in agony    
pounding a rocky surface,
but the air I swim, had no water.
I prodded these  Menhaden of the Rock
to the fringe of retreating tides,
and they leaped to die once more
to breathe water that had no air

Blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted

Blessed is the discomfiture
of my brackish tears
that streak marsh faces
as fish struggle out of dead water.
I take comfort I don't inhabit
tainted places or do I take comfort,
all places are the tint of poison,
the gleam of a genesis of sorrow

In an ocean of night, dreaming of a closed dining space / We were snooping in on a harsh conversation of strangers that we knew / Towards dawn you spoke / as real in the dream as an apparition in the real / of Father and Mother / of them cruising off on a road trip / You faltered at a word I recollect but won't spell / It absorbed into whale song ticking to a time piece / itching to signal morning / and I could feel the depth of many fathoms  floating over a waking to Spring / like being pressed against a cherry blossom trunk / in a tug of war, a push and pull / Let's go Jungian on this, he is much more pleasant / I did see a bumble bee yesterday, not a golden scarab, although that could have been a circadian premonition / and I woke up to a shower of blossoms //

We thought of us today as single cells
'Ciliating' across the universe of colour
under the coverslip of time; a microcosm
of pedalling plants or fettuccine of cells.

The hues of darkness are pink and bright,
in beach slippers tracing paths on glass,
and those springing Vorticella are flowers
we created in our fictions of science ...

But all possess a veneer bound
cytoplasm of affection, crawling like
Annelids across the void in a world
bursting in avatars of the invisible

or their transparent real selves
glowing like gemstones in the sky,
or simply opaque as we are, each
to the other under the play of light,

polarized views secreted within some
dark muddied pond, harbouring
the cells of love, shedding cuticles
of sorrow, laying the germ of tomorrow

or funneling delight in little green globes
that make food ... are food. We must be
blessed to be cytoplasm like them or cursed,
I don't know which, but it's all profound.

Whispers I sent out to dawn latched
on to the solitary sun to trail
the arc of a common time
in a sky the hue of gold in grass.
The land leans on the baobab
in a dust storm of wheels and lenses.
Wheels and lenses.

When the dust settles, I will dust
my shuka and the goats will return
home, to comfort my eyes that flow
the spate of the Great Ruaha,
seeping secretly into the baobab
I have chores to do, a shuka to ****.
A shuka to ****.

Will they buy the beads I strung
as I rocked Naeku on my back,
to make circles of day and circles
of night, as wide as the baobab,
in the colour of clouds, the colour of sky.
There's colour to stars in a darkened night.
A darkened night.

Killeleshua is fragrant in thousand leaves
Am I not worth more than thirteen Zebu?
The watering hole was flecked in hippos
and the firewood is the colour of dusk
abundantly generous as the baobab
Time, a viscous passing of the sweetest honey.
The sweetest honey.

A lonesome threshold,
yesterday was light as confetti / from a wedding that
bled in thirty litres of martyred roses / How long are
three hundred steps from a church, to stucco walls
the colour of sorrow?

Soil, the tint of blood,
ichor of mountain Gods, deveined for lost embrace
of roots / Wind whistling away regrets in the dust of
liberated souls / Would it sing for her, embalmed
in the bowels of earth’s sanguine hum?

April heat, weighted with a dirge
of tears salted in ocean / rusting the trumpet
and violin strings / Who will tune the piano for mass,
now that those musical men sailed before her,
in paper boat memoirs?

The Goliath tree rooted in bones,
a giant on such sustenance / gatekeeper of souls
tethered to fleshy sinews in beds of solitude /
Will she be interred in fruit, as he suppers
on her animated putrefaction?

Suffering, twice a child,
once a lady, she didn’t stay long to be swaddled
in linens of pity, cottons of commiserations /
Where will I store the enameled chamber *** for
when I grow up to be her likeness?

Nightshades, funneling viscous memories,
trumpeting in a pastel wilderness, alkaloid racket
waiting to sound in the poisons of prayerful echoes /
When will they bloom, toxic with grief of a swelling past,
so I may sleep as soundly as her?

Cornrows forge a rhythm to the sun
and self love feels like a line dance.
A shake of tassels and silks that
unfurl in the nick of time.

Love flowers on a stalk, above, below.
The wind sweeps in an airy betrothal,
a surge and then a sway, sashay,
a whirl in the nick of time.

Pollen, sparkles, pixel burst.
How do the ears of corn know,
to listen to the wind holler,
to twirl in the nick of time.

In a Caryopsis, a synopsis
of self seducing passions,
crushed to cornmeal. Floury
swirl in the nick of time.

Off the shoulder of Orion onto the arm of Perseus / in sentient skin sheathing the tingle of nerves / a mortal hunger for a view of the galaxy broader than the Milky Way / an awakened pulse in a soulless being / stronger, brighter, speedier, warrior / yet now, wiser / lover / beloved / thirsting for life / unafraid of who he is / never hidden in the arrow flailing off the arm of the Archer / a philosophical spiraling through a riot of 200 billion stars / looking inwards to what he may become //
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It was the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) who described authenticity as choosing the nature of one’s existence and identity. He linked the concept of authenticity to an awareness of our mortality, positing that only in keeping in view the inevitability of death can one lead a truly authentic life.

Heidegger, Sartre and Camus among others have all discussed and debated the idea of authenticity, free will, freedom of action being a path to self realization etc. I enjoy the thoughts of these erudite thinkers and it brought to mind the most moving death speech ever recorded in cinematic history, that of the replicant Roy Batty from Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’ (1982). It is supremely poetic and for a replicant who tried in the course of the film, to find the meaning of his life and a way to increase his lifespan, it is filled with reflection in an awareness of an authentic self and a regret in his imminent mortality. The 42 word monologue what Rutger Hauer (who plays Roy) delivered after he had his way with the original version.

Tears in the Rain

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die’.

I have enjoyed the idea of the search for a meaning of life by AI that lack human consciousness. It’s a beautiful riveting moment in the film where the empathy one feels for someone striving to be human is much more than one would feel for detective Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), who projects himself throughout the movie as less human and more of a replicant. What is authenticity? For an observer, it would be Roy Batty’s deathbed regret of not having lived to the potential he assumed he had if his lifespan were extended. It is the pain of losing his lover in the course of the film, the opportunity and the ability to show compassion to an assassin like Deckard, the hope of learning to be sentient, an escape from slavery of AI. This movie is quite a treat for the understated screenplay, the poignant moments, the inherent philosophical questions that arise. This poem is my tribute to Roy Batty who I believe, appears more human than a human would strive to be.

The clouds fell from their lofty perch onto her belly / wrapped in layers of time this Matryoshka/ flouncy in snowflakes / cold startles the birds / the trains are stillborn / marshes float on ice / and nights look like silence //

She fashions a snowman / they speak in parables of time / is it shaped like a sisal string or a potter’s wheel / does it appear like a falling star / disappear like a glacier / is it syllabic conversations at dusk / or chimneys brewing clouds into sky / while fires roast limbs of arthritic trees //

Her sundial is circular / like the lunacy of seasons / His, fractalizes into uncertain snowflakes / transformed by an arrow flung far to an unknown distance / Gaia awakens in ****** spring / a forced maturity squinting at trains that furrow the land / bleeding in cherry blossoms / wealthy as the emerald leaves she wears to a country gala //

The snowman computes time / stray facts the winter wind whispered into his ear / as he melts into January’s cloak / like tears shed for sparkling fractals lost forever / The Earth believes in the manner of faith , he will resurrect on her sundial / as she kisses time into momentary stillness, turns water into ice //

The streets fidget at this intersection at gazes of stone men / sweeping birds in the gusts of a smug exhalation / The signs say they aren’t meant to feed the pigeons / falling onto the pavement like confetti /hoping for crumbs of compassion //

In the morning hid behind a mask / we exchange glances of belief / truths etched in our silhouettes as the eyes / paint vivid portraits of what must exist/ in the blue, green, grey, brown / hazel or amber inlay of the other //

The times when our smiles were obscured in sunlight and streetlight / people bled onto the path in a diaphanous glow / The invisible slipped past our eyes / but not of the stone men / They have always been solid / sentinels of our displaced pulse / as we erred in the manner of stone //

There it looms, a life like mountain/ sheathed in fynbos, all shades of green/ while the cape drags in reluctant seaweed/ and the wind makes contrails of my hair/

I ascend too with the heather, the rooibos and the hottentot/ We climb/ now a collective of exaggerated beauty/ defiant in wind, spray and fire/

There are leaves as prone as a flat lined heart/ reeds as resilient as a returning pulse/and we all watch the hope of yolk/ of a Sunday sun dipping into the ocean/promising to rise again/

We creep up the leeward and the windward/ ensconced in the spiral of a soul entropy/ determined to survive every rock and crevice/ to hoist ourselves up the flagpole of the cosmic plan/