R. Joseph Hoffmann's Blog: Khartoum, page 10

Aphorism

That turnabout is fair
I won't agree.

The time I wasted
Now is wasting me.

Glory Gone: An Anthem

An Anthem for the Day

Oh Say, can you see
In the day's after-light
All the graves freshly hewn
At the school day's dark ending?

Whose young bodies are these
Lost to promise and sight,
Gone from supple to stone,
By the turn from breath wending?

And the bullets astray--
the screams piercing the fray--
Heard by Phoebus above
But by Congressmen, Nay.

O say, do these children
robbed thus of innocence
Rest in peace or curse the men
Who create violence?

r joseph hoffmann 15.2.2018

A Valentine

How many voices can you accumulate
and stay in one place, fixed or unfixed?
One says, 'So black no sky could squeak through'
'You do not do, you do not do...'
But the antiphon comes from a frail page
coaxing you to say 'like the thirteenth fairy
her fingers as long and thin as straws'
You would rather die than be awakened by a kiss,
your finger pricked on a poison briar.
A kiss a kiss you do not do or miss.
Now words begin to run like water upward
into mist: they do not flow, they scatter
and spar for air: sparkling when the
sun hits them at the center, no matter
they dissolve to gray and form thin puddles
beneath feet rooted to impossible positions,
'all thoughts slow and brown', challenging
the gods to let you be your pagan self,
your lovers to understand the impuissance
of their love, love the rabbit you the owl
You do not do you do not do
Athena, Persephone, Ishtar too.

Bedtime Story

Child I will not lie to you.
Hansel and Gretel never come home.
They die of cold and hunger
Dreaming of a cake their mother
Once made them. In the dream
They eat their fill of cake.
They are warm and loved and tired.
But then the men came,
In Lodz and Vilnius, even Vienna,
In Mosul, Tikrit, and fractured Tripoli
The men of political action
Acting under orders,
And men who spoke to God directly.
They took their father first
And grandfather, and mother last.
She had been waiting when they came,
By the open screenless window.
And she went, quiet as a nun,
Kissing each of them on the forehead.
They did not have room for Hansel
Or his small sister on the truck,
So the sergeant said flat as a skillet
On a sunlit January day
Leave them. They are starving anyway.

A Dialogue of the Soul

You used to prowl outside
my bedroom window, scuttling
icy rungs to get near,
rapping lightly, your cold breath
expiring against the cracked pane.
Let me in. Don’t let me freeze out here.
I bought a padlock,
hid under a torn green blanket,
behind stone fences of desire.

And when I went out
I checked up and down the stairwell
for shadows of you, peered
distances to make out the shape
of you coming towards me
listened like an Indian
for any sound of you
saying my name
with your quiet and certain voice.
All fear is love quantified, expressed
As a fraction of the lies we tell.

I didn't want to be caught
running Maine roads in June,
terrified I would see you beneath
the next tree,
standing frozen in the brown lawn
of a big white house, unexpected as a kiss.
I dreamt you at Issykul trailing
me on a bicycle. I stayed,
darling, for your birthday
got you Dostoevsky and a shirt
because you said love shouldn't hurt.

I loved you like the first snow
in November,
wept into Chinese lakes
when you vanished into a new life.
Sampled poison
when I heard you were happy
and more beautiful than anyone remembered.

Souls fall to earth
because they are ambitious.
After all,
they have seen God and rebellious
ones think there must be more.
For what's hell if not the possibility
that god is all there is?
The final irony is his.

You were the forgetting of higher love,
calling me downward to a flightless world:
Your narrow eyes, the proof of why souls
having loved the human way
cannot rise again;
your touch, your kiss and coils,
why they forget their Paradise
and end as exiles to the truth
of our beginnings.

المصير السماوي

BE incense.
Cuzzle me with fire
and fragrance upon burning ash
in the thurible of faith,
your finger beckoning me,
Come.

Fill my nostrils
with your sweetness
and pure breath,
your light touch and soft neck,
where a restless spirit
rises to your lips
and breathes holiness
into my longing for you.

Be thou my vision
of the purer touch:
Lighten--make fuller's white
and fine as flour--
the stain of what is shirk in me.

Be the way:
Give me a prophet's words
as the smooth path,
as smooth as skin,
as dangerous as flesh:
for the path is rutted
only to fools,
and all ways lead through night
to you in the waiting day,
my pilgrim guide and visitor.

ندى

T will happen like snow melting
on a warm December day
or the ice hardening in sheathes
when winter wails again
through streets and pocked alleyways.
It will happen like Christmas morning
breaking unexcused through the purple sky
--or a ten month old forgetting how to crawl,
a cat meowing for dinner at five
(and you in no mood, just in the door).
It happens as suddenly as a hard bud
bursts into the red succulence of a rose,
as quickly as hair grays or fire catches paper.
And when it comes it does not roar, whelp,
ring the bell or clear its ancient throat:
It happens in the quietness of knowing
that love changes the waiting heart
and cannot be avoided or refused.

Impediment

It begins when Fate says blink:
when I felt in one look
the story of my longing for you,
for I have longed for you always,
And longing is deeper than love.

It begins in a tide of silence,
in the swordplay of eyes,
or the memory of pain, lovers who fled,
lying, and weeping for moments
you could not know or calculate,

But love escaped and left
only longing in its place.

Longing is like this:
At the start of things, it finds tragedy
in every happiness and sees death
in the awakening stars
of an eastern night in winter.
It does not die like a weakening star
or lessen with years of sorrow.

I long for you as I long for day
never to break, for the sun
never to wake you.
Because in waking you will
leave me and forget that
I longed for you always.

النيل‎‎

I’m walking near the famous water.
It is not blue or gray
but the colour of time rushing away
pushed by gods—Isis, Ra, the Elohim.
Just after the days of the Muslim seer
girls of twelve were dressed in sheer linen,
rubbed with nard, laden with golden rings
and checked beads
and thrown into the Nile’s belly to make it swell
in gratitude. It had always liked men more than fish,
It ate Osiris. It wanted to eat Moses.

In the time of Umar
the water of ages craved a maid each year
or (it said) "I will stand still, my fish a stink,
cattle and men dying, from Egypt to torpid Nubia."

Umar ibn Khattab wrote on paper: “Flow of your power
or race by the power of God, but do not take
What is not yours. Do not do these things
Or we will hate you.” He threw the paper into the water,
and the Nile swelled furiously to twice its breadth,
fell back Into its natural banks,
chastened by a book.

ii

But those are children's stories told by men.
Today it flows past me by the same decree
and I think of you, and how this river does not flow
by the power of dead gods
or cards tossed out in moral rage at its killing power.
It was here before the virgins came to feed it,
before Moses came to float in his thatched house,
before the sons of the Egyptians lost their sons
to its poisonous bounties.

I have no words on paper to give you, but a wish that one day
I will see you without silk and jewelry, unscented and unveiled,
walking without distraction beside the forgiving water,
not a fearer of furious gods or men but a lover
of rivers and their flow.
We will share the mystery of our meeting here
in the same flowing silence that thrust you before my eyes.

Prepositions

How can the fly
e'er holpen to win
when he tries
to fly out
but can only fly in?