Quotes about wizened, page 5
Karisa, Wangari, Michuki and Karume
Now I know what heaven requires
This I learnt in a black, blackish week
The gospel about the humble and the meek
The passing on of one man who my soul inspires
And that of another whose memory will like glue stick
Also, one man whose vibrancy made graft creek
In-charge of the government local though not as weak
I know as well what bliss doesn't yearn for,
Not for men who perform as four
Or for women who only assume the front form
Seldom for hypocritical international pacifiers
Rather for a local governor like Karisa
Or a change driver who fuelled affirmatives in his maisha
Like one Michuki whose footstep made retrogressions quiver
Once in a while, a Karume whose progress would never waver
Governance in Heaven badly needed to keep it clean
From mother Kenya it found a local government champ
Karisa cleaned heaven and restored the local lamp
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poem by David Munene wa Kimberly
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0062 Robinia Pseudoacacia Alba
Its trunk is right next to the front gate
so that as I go out, there's a faint flicker
of guilt and anger - next door's insurance company
want me to have it cut down, which I resent; it's just
so beautiful. It calls out love.
All of four feet high when I bought it,
slender, almost unnoticeable, and a glorious mistake
since I'd confused it with a 'real' slow-growing acacia;
now it towers over the house, superb, generous and delicate,
gently shaken by the breeze as if to speak of eternal youth.
It's the one you see punctuating with its bright green fountain,
urban 'developments'; unaffected even a few feet from a 24-hour freeway, as incongruously itself as a geisha at a bus stop.
It hasn't forgotten it's really a forest tree, and reminds us daily
with aristocratic pride and a generous beauty,
which should shame those same 'developers'
who know it'll melt the hearts of photographers and clients alike...
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Aurobindo 27-Savitri-Book -2
An appreciation on Savitri
Book II The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds
Canto V The Godheads of the Little Life
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's
'A fixed and narrow power with rigid forms,
He saw the empire of the little life,
An unhappy corner in eternity.'
'Then, hoping to learn the secret of this world
He peered across its scanty fringe of sight, ..'
........'A busy restless uncouth populace
Teemed in their dusky unnoted thousands there.'
I bow, what an expression wonderful on 'uncouth populace'!
'In a mist of secrecy wrapping the world-scene
The little deities of Time's nether act
Who work remote from Heaven's controlling eye,
Plotted, unknown to the creatures whom they move,
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poem by Indira Renganathan
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The Storm
1
Against the stone breakwater,
Only an ominous lapping,
While the wind whines overhead,
Coming down from the mountain,
Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;
A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,
And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against
the lamp pole.
Where have the people gone?
There is one light on the mountain.
2
Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,
The waves not yet high, but even,
Coming closer and closer upon each other;
A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea,
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poem by Theodore Roethke
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Knights Of The Never Never
When I rode with young Sid Kidman out across the Yarrowie Plain
In that year the Long Drought ended, and the northlands smiled again
As we took the old Tarcowie track and on to Booleroo,
His keen eye scanned the country, and we yarned of men we knew:
Mal Murray and Jim Spicer, of Jasser and Judell,
Bill Mitchell and old stagers whom I still remember well;
And he told of chance-missed fortunes when the game was in his grasp,
Of life along The Barrier with German Charlie Rasp.
Now, back in Kidman country where the grizzled bushmen are,
In many a stark out-station, o'er many a shanty bar,
The drovers' drawling voices talk about 'Old Sid' today:
'Bushmen like him ain't raised no more,' the grizzled veterans say,
For o'er the furthest saltbush lands his questing mind went out
To glimpse high opportunity where others saw black drought.
Shrewd-eyed, yet greatly daring, laughing he ventured forth
To stake his luck, his judgment 'gainst swift treacheries 'up north.'
'I mind the time I rode with him,' a wizened stockman says.
'He knowed that country like a map, an' all the tricks an' ways.
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poem by Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis
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Autobiographical Rap
Note: The following must be read while someone is beat boxing
Born in west Yemen, I was raised a child
Spent my time in the streets, where I grew to be wild
Drove my parents crazy, they were exasperated
To a Yemen monastery they had me donated
I studied there for years before I became part of the clergy
My mentor's name was Serj, he taught 'bout liturgy
According to the rules when I was twenty-two
I had to be expelled, I didn't know what to do
So I spent my time wanderin' through the great Mid-East
Town-hopping, tale-swapping just to say the least
I trekked up and down, through multiple places
I think I must have seen at least a million faces
Hiking through Pakistan and even Malaysia
'Til I realized I'd ended up in south-east Asia
Sometimes these crazy journeys can really amaze ya
But you got to make a stop when your compass betrays ya
I was lost, with my location I couldn't come to terms
Until I met up with a doctor of a pachyderm
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poem by Florence P. Wordsmith
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The Philosopher's Study
A very average room, in a standard terrace house:
the welcome sunlight- ruthless though -
truth itself come down to earth -
reveals that the windows
could be cleaner; yet,
could be dirtier;
shows up the gentle layer of dust –
gentle in its fall, not gentle in its mercy – and
not rising from the earth, but
falling invisibly over time
from the ceiling whose last decorator
used a paint less than the best;
who ever invited dust?
But here it is, inviting in its turn
a passing twinge of guilt; it could be
a metaphor for the philosophic:
dust the mind occasionally,
time brings complacency
and thoughts grow stale,
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Meditation
With sadness I survey our present generation!
Their future seems so empty, dark, and cold,
Weighed down beneath a load of knowing hesitation,
In idleness stagnating, growing old.
We have received, when barely finished weaning,
The errors of our sires, their tardiness of mind,
And life oppresses us, a flat road without meaning,
An alien feast where we have dined.
T'ward good and evil shamefully uncaring
We wilt without a fight when starting on life's race;
When danger threatens us - ignoble want of daring,
Before those set on high - despicable and base.
A wizened fruit grown ripe before its hour,
No pleasure to the eye and no delight to taste,
An orphan stranger there, he hangs beside the flower -
The time of its full bloom is his to fall and waste.
For we have dried our brains with fruitless speculations,
Withholding enviously from friends and those ahout
The ringing voice of lofty aspirations
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poem by Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov
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The Swamp
FOR one whole day and a long night through
We made our camp
In a she-oak grove by a coastal swamp.
Our tent gleamed white in the she-oak trees,
Whose falling hair
Made a soft, brown mist in the sweet blue air.
A sound subdued from their tresses rose —
A moan, a sigh
As of unseen seas, when the breeze went by.
'Twas wattle-time, and the scented bloom,
New lit and young,
In a mass of gold from the still trees hung.
There music dwelt, and a splendour moved
Through all the day
From the green of dawn to the twilight gray.
For careless ever, like one who goes
Where Joyance leads,
Sang the little reed-bird in the tall, green reeds.
Blue, swift and slender the dragonflies
A-hawking flew,
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poem by Roderic Quinn
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Prologue to Declining Change
There where you had no occasion for play
There in your confined Ming I space
Where change wrought no change
in your fate
But for those plagued by your linear grouping games
Where before the fall from your embroidered gardens
the lavender embossed bowl to dip your fingers in
the enamelled daïs that spurned the kowtows
the cloistered summer watering palace
the decorative duck pond
the turtle and dove court
where dainty demure mincing concubines
under dispassionate eunuch eyes
stroked and tickled the mandolin strings of their Lord's heart
Where time sailed through Flying Dutchman seas
at the serene centre of Qian's mundane realm
Even what drops from the sky may hit the ocean bed
and so stamped under in your tyrant's dungeons
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poem by T. Wignesan
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