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explorereality
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AXplorer
omaha ne    I'm just now discovering the language of emotion. Poetry has become my Rosetta stone, and all of you my interpreters
HeWhoExplores
27/M/Belfast    A young man who enjoys living life to the full. Whether that be writing, travelling or drinking coffee. He continuously seeks to learn more about …

Poems

Michael R Burch Dec 2021
The Story
by Kamal Nasser
translation by Michael R. Burch

I will tell you a story ...
a story that lived in the dreams of my people,
a story that comes from the world of tents.
It is a story inspired by hunger and embellished by dark nights of terror.
It is the story of my country, a handful of refugees.
Every twenty of them have a pound of flour between them
and a few promises of relief ... gifts and parcels.
It is the story of the suffering ones
who stood waiting in line ten years,
in hunger,
in tears and agony,
in hardship and yearning.
It is a story of a people who were misled,
who were thrown into the mazes of the years.
And yet they stood defiant,
disrobed yet united
as they trudged from the light to their tents:
the revolution of return
into the world of darkness.

Kamal Nasser was a much-admired Palestinian poet and Palestinian Christian, who due to his renowned integrity was known as "The Conscience." He was a member of Jordan's parliament in 1956. He was murdered in 1973 by an Israeli death squad whose most notorious member was future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak (born Ehud Brog) later ruled as Israel’s tenth Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001. His adopted Hebrew name Barak means "lightning." As a younger man, Brog/Barak was a member of a secret assassination unit that liquidated Palestinians in Lebanon and the occupied territories. In the 1973 covert mission Operation Spring of Youth in Beirut, which was part of the larger Operation Wrath of God, he disguised himself as a woman in order to assassinate Palestinians. The raid resulted in the deaths of two women, one of them an elderly Italian. Two Lebanese policemen were also killed, along with the poet Kamal Nasser.

Nasser was the PLO's most prominent Christian and he enjoyed "great appeal" in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq "both as a distinguished poet and likeable personality." He was the “conscience of the Palestinian revolution,” according to Nazih Abul-Nidal, who worked with him on the magazine Filastin al-Thawra. Nasser “had the most democratic outlook of all Palestinian leaders at the time,” he recalls. He respected opposing views, admired the commitment of young people, and was a major recruitment asset for the Palestinian revolution. “That is why he was put high on the hit-list.” The previous year, the Israelis had murdered another renowned Palestinian writer and activist in Beirut, Ghassan Kanafani, by *****-trapping his car. Nasser’s successor, Majed Abu Sharar, was also assassinated by Israelis, in Rome in 1981 while attending a conference in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Keywords/Tags: Kamal Nasser, Palestinian, Palestine, PLO, Conscience, Ramallah, Christian, religion, poet, Arab, Arabic, Arab Spring, betrayal, conflict, courage, devotion
Ken Pepiton  Nov 2018
Great gain
Ken Pepiton Nov 2018
life more abundant calls forth an expandable reality primo,
thus wisdom, the principal thing when-ce all other
things may be made

machine level codifiers ifying
meaning back into idle words.

Keep the secret. Answer the call,
who will help the widow's son?

You, Templar, what message bear ye to my child?,
asked the widow.
Fi-del-e-tus. with a squeeze and a tap,
wink and grin

Poet, who named the prophet?
who named the teller to tales?
who gave thee hearing ear and seeing eye?

Some mind imagined those as yet unformed in forever past.
You agree. You experienced living, so far.

So good, we move on, figurative re re re al-it if-ity
Haps apt to appear be fore your veri variety of being even
hapt as a thing thought, imagined made for a function, as yet

undone. Conserve the NULL set, that whole idea is dangerously
close to fading…

Have you seen those videos of soap bubbles filled with H
and no O?
You should see those, to recall the phenomenonal pre-dictatorial
image, see the bubble, invisible but
for reflection of ambient ambits in our epigenetic radiosphere,

bubbles collapse, and for a flash, flame orange shaped
as the bubble was.
No ex-plo sion it-a-tivity, mere dis cipation,
loss of grip on the shape of things that were, now
con forms to re per ceive,

try again, get a good grip, swing and a miss, go again
take a Mulligan, I think, some game has such a rule,

We can use it here. We can scroll back up,
like a rope lift on the bunny hill at Big Bear, back when…

wheels in wheels, bubbles in bubbles, forms in forms

this is the information age I was informed. Adamkind, those
qubitical, ambitical little images of

Who, who? would a name comfort-you worth more than a breath?
Fresh air after a minuted moment twixt out and in again,

Power, create ific power haps twixt out an in again,
the cipitation, the d was missed, what if it were not?

re-read, religion once meant that, re-connect, too,
religion meant that state of having re-read the map,
re-tied the worth carrying,
stacked the worthless by the trail so
some hapless stranger may see
the treasure it was and is, to any who care to

receive, or con ceive it for the
truth I found in it and kept, which I leave to you
here:
Both treasure and truth are where ye find them,
and shall be for ever, when ever starts for you.

Ezekial, judge my riddle, please. The fool missed the
point of conception…
No, no no no

A fool's dance in a Phrygian cap with useless, symbolic wings…
gee, Phrygian, means nothing to you? Google it, you live in the future.
Later,
A time upon which a Mercury dime would comfort
a rich American Tyrant, son of the Flim-flam man,
no lie, this is mythic, you can't make this stuff up
its history. Hysterical, right
John D. Standard-for-Petropower-manifestation,
the dead's carbon footprints bubbling up
to fire and fridgin' ice, whoa, who broke the world,

I was distracted. Did you know the planet is
as self healing as those scabs on my grandkids knees?

ah, caper, eh? Capere, to grasp, to take,
ceive means accept by taking,
be liefing an idea ceived ex nihilo, is likened unto

Drinking from a still pond in a distant land. Sults,
results. may result in,
Dear Rhea revenging Montezuma, at a gut level.

However, a sort of how in an open mind facing forever,
a sort of omni-directional saliency
seeing further,
--Bomb, Jesus-bomb--

At least two reasons for thinking Jesus is objective, out side
you or inside you. You aren't Jesus. Jesus is a friend of mine,
in my mind, object-if-I-try
to pray, listen pray hopes
happen
shapes form
forever from ever point, every point, not of, in buy

a why..
why does a y on the end of every mean any thing?

That's the y-factor. You will learn why wise men still seek those.
As treasure, they are light, and the taste is beyond

the grasp of tongue to tell

that whole class of moded-ever words weave wards
whenever, forever, however, whatever
used proper, everafter,
that will save Dresden, some time, we think.

However, now, Rhea by name has entered the game.

Who is this named femofame? What game is she good in?
Or does she just knock the **** out of lying spirits?
Cool.

Ah, mother of all the gods, I recall, I mean
I meant to say
I remember, then I for got the power words hold here
exactly heare in eleven metrixed mentions,

this point, in time, not of time.
In the world, not of the world, you've heard the pharse?
The allusion is not lost on you, you know the phrase,

In the world, not of the world, holier men than I have
claimed to be, while I follow a few fine words,
linguistic kief, sprinkled fairy dust, like the stuff
captured in the gleaming film on your
microscopic-outer eye

see a salient point in time.

A pin point 'pon which one,
no more,
one story begins for ever, a gain in good net
value, if

we have tasted that word, chewed the gristle,
indigestible ligaments and sin-yews and such,
which once anchored meat to bone,

value is first good. Good e nough, nough
Gut genug, okeh,
maybe not my best, my best is yet to come, they say.

sufficient for today
------

enough (adj.)
c. 1300, from Old English genog "sufficient in quantity or number,"
from Proto-Germanic compound *ganog "sufficient"
(source also of Old Saxon ginog,
Old Frisian enoch, Dutch genoeg,
Old High German ginuog, German genug,
Old Norse gnogr, Gothic ganohs).
First element is Old English ge- "with, together"
(also a participial, collective, intensive, or perfective prefix),
making this word the most prominent surviving example
of the Old English prefix,
the equivalent of Latin com- and Modern German ge- 
(from PIE *kom- "beside, near, by, with;" see com-).
Second element is from PIE *nok-, from root *nek- (2)
"to reach, attain"
(source also of Sanskrit asnoti "to reach,"
Hittite ninikzi "lifts, raises,"
Lithuanian nešti "to bear, carry," Latin nancisci "to obtain").

As an adverb, "sufficiently for the purpose,"
in Old English; meaning
"moderately, fairly, tolerably" (good enough) was in Middle English. Understated sense, as in have had enough "have had too much" was in Old English (which relied heavily on double negatives and understatement).

As a noun in Old English,
"a quantity or number sufficient for the purpose." As an interjection, "that is enough," from c. 1600. Colloquial 'nough said is attested from 1839.

From <https://www.etymonline.com/word/enough#etymonlinev8703>
Godliness with contentment is great gain, a precept I was chewing on following a ritual holy day of gratitude to goodness for goodness sake in my cultural gut genug state of mind.
Sam Temple Jul 2014
battling demons
or suffering PTSD
with ADHD
and OCD
on TCH
looking for LSD –
need a little TLC
from the FDA
the EPA
just went MIA
and the UN
blames the FBI
while the CIA
and the NSA
seek the PLO –
brb
LOL, IDK
the shizzle is cray cray
*****’s be trippin
er’ry day
like Ross say
“don’t **** wit me” –
the USA
in betrothed to the NRA
and OSHA
just gave me a passing score
at the same time as the AMA
failed my blood
stylistically, this is MLA
and functionally it’s more WWE
TNT
CNN
t’n’a --