CHILDREN OF DUST
We have been told that joy and sorrow
are sister and brother
born from the same mother.
the mother is life
and life is old,
if not as old as time herself, then born minutes after.
More ancient then earth. More ancient than water.
We do not wonder why we are happy, only why we suffer.
If that is the question, there is no answer.
For as long as pen or bloodied finger tip has been put to palm leaves or paper
joy and sorrow have been known to quarrel
like an old married couple
like a pair of newborn twins sharing the same cradle.
The cradle is you.
And you are the universe.
An infinite piece of origami, forever folding within.
If God were to take that paper crane and smooth out the creases,
there would be no end to your dazzling unfoldment.
The spaciousness of your heart, no sky could contain.
And learning this is the hardest part. The cruelest truth is to know this weak flesh is heir to the stars.
Just the dust, but that is royalty enough.
This body is a poor vessel for the majesty that is you.
You didn’t ask for this unhappy marriage of body and soul.
You didn’t ask to be here at all.
We are all refugees; angels after the fall.
These are the thoughts that haunt me When my body finds no sleep.
Yet I find peace in a refrain: It is the cosmos that flows through these veins.
If we are branches of the same tree If I am your brother and you are mine Then what is true for you is true for me:
We are stars waiting only to shine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/7xllb5/no_moisture/du9c6ky/
Posted Feb 14, 2018, 11:09 PM UTC · edited
For context: not your typical post-modernist fare. more in the vein of Hafez or Rumi or Rilke or Gibran. Not sure if this is the right space, but I do want to share the work and see how it's landing. If you've read this far, Thanks!
It reads specifically like Coleman Barks' translations of Rumi, which is sort of postmodern, actually -- Rumi wrote in highly structured rhymed verse which is pretty difficult to preserve when you're going from Persian to English.
It's lovely. You could lose a few lines without losing any of the meaning of the poem. You're working with a few different ideas -- personification of joy and sorrow, stardust, origami, refugees. Rumi's poetry uses this technique to show the multi-faceted nature of God and spirituality. It sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't. Here it feels the refugee and stardust ideas get tossed out quite quickly, and the other ideas get a much more thorough treatment. Why is that? The poem might be more effective if you just combine those two images and stick with them, rather than throwing too many things away.