A new Tunisian poetic genre is born.
What is a "Kasserine"?
Structure:
A Kasserine is a new poetic genre created on July 9, 2017. In it all is condensed in two lines with a sum total of thirteen or fourteen syllables. Its first line cannot exceed seven of them.
The title of a Kasserine must be an integral part of the poem in terms of interpretation. The number of its syllables must not exceed seven.
Subject matter:
In a Kasserine nature and imagination perform the same poetic activity. Nature ceases to be a mere mirror reflecting the feelings of the poet, the political or social situation, etc., and becomes symbolic in the very moment it renounces representation as a one-to-one correspondence . Nature in a Kasserine has no existence prior to the pricking into action of the imagination by the self of the poet. For, even though it is groundless (it does not belong to the self), the imagination has no intentionality of its own; this is why it needs the intentionality of the subject in order to be operative.
Samples of a Kasserine

Ruby Sun
Among amethyst silk clouds
She flirts with the sapphire sea
(c) Paula Swenson, USA

Tunisia
A fair island of light
in my imagination
(c) Jeffard Ster, USA

Red Giant
A star inside her implodes
Heavens of chaos unfold
(c) Stefan David Sederscog, Sweden

Voyeurism
The sea kisses the sky
Imagination beholds.
© LazharBouazzi, Tunisia



Note: Friends and acquaintances are cordially invited to start writing sublime (marked by repression of meaning) Kasserines.
(c)Lazhar Bouazzi, 9 July, 2017.

the boy enters when he knows
others will not be there
in prayer--their silent entreaties
to a god he is not sure
listens or cares

morning after mass is best;
the bouquets are fresh
he can smell them once
the scent of the early
worshipers fades:

the pipe smoke from the old man's
coat
the widow's perfume which lingers longer than the ammonia stench
of the holy homeless who is there
every day

Christ watches over this:
a white marble man bolted
to a cross, witnessing
this spectacle for millennia

long before this cold statue
was placed in this cathedral,
he was there, the slaughtered lamb
cursed to die again and again

that is how the boy sees it;
not a promised life eternal,
but the same death anon,
anon

the pounding of the stakes,
the blood offering: the old man, the woman, the mendicant
all crucifying him again with
each plaintive prayer

once their odors fade,
the funeral sprays, the bouquets
remain--cut, dying flowers,
a fragrant impermanence
with no expectation for life
beyond their time in the
vase--no imploring a godhead
for forgiveness

no demand for blood
and perpetual death

only a little water for their brief journey
in fragile glass

a flock of them we call a ******,
though not what I did to ****** men
I shot on the Mekong, who did nothing
but startle me a muggy morn  

I watched them float,
face down in primordial mire,
not far from the wire, which
split their world from mine  

birds came by noon
greedy passerines perching, pecking
on black clad backs; they sang not a word
of thanks to me

though I had made a meal of men,
for those who drop from blue skies--not even
when the flesh pulled swiftly from bone, and
blood flowed silent over their talons

July 4, 1970, Mekong Delta, Vietnam

little remains
of my grandfather's house:
raw rafters, warped planks with hints
my uncle invested in paint

the windows all gone, time
and twisters took them, and much
of the roof--what is left of that sags,
a silent submission to gravity

a woodstove survives, cold
to the touch, with no memory
of the fire it once birthed, the precious
prairie timber which fed it

now it knows only mourning
doves' song; winged squatters
unperturbed by my presence, as if
they know I lay no claim to now

the old boards have stories
I will never hear: the birth of babes,
reading the Word by kerosene lamps,
the last breaths of men

the songbirds may know,
but they woo the living in flight--a
future of nesting and fertile eggs; they
owe no belated dirge to long lost kin

They bring with them the baggage of men
the lost children attempting pathetically
to recreate the aura of time long gone.

If you discount the roughness of skin
travel past the thick hedge of beard
penetrate the silt on the eroded eyes
you can delayer the hardened coats
and get to see  faces barely recognizable.

Some were once too close to be missed
their names and all
but most you could hardly recall
and it agonizes your thought
were they in the same class or not.

You smile till your jaws ache
fetching stories from the blue
dazzlingly colored and half true
for they are all in the mood
to joyfully succumb to falsehood.

You could tell from the body language
who's  in the backburner
and who on the front page.

Forty years break and make men
but they feign happiness
to be united again.