As imarets
transform to minarets,
and rigid ideologies prevail –
states fail.
Tag: poetry
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The Rise and Fall of the Ottoman Empire
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Seville Cathedral
Seville Cathedral used to house Christian and Muslim worshippers side-by-side.
After the inquisition took power, the Muslim part was appropriated and built over with Christian symbology.
You can still see the interface. It is cracking. -
Entitlement
The sense of entitlement is a trap:
as you are entitled – you do nothing;
as you do nothing – you achieve nothing;
as you achieve nothing – you feel deprived of what you are entitled to. -
Cordoba
A mass of yellow stone
floating in the blue
of the clear, brilliant sky above
and the turbulent Guadalquivir below –
its enormous bulk
made weightless by the context.
Ottoman Cordoba was a univer-city,
a unverse with a small “u”.
A mess of cultures,
sweaty cross-fertilization –
exciting,
faintly indecent,
infinitly productive.
Not the golden mean of Aristotle,
not the measured path of restraint –
contorted co-mingling,
intertwined but not melded.
The way of Socrates –
clear contradiction that is growth
made stone. -
Andalusia
Andalusia is defined sharply
by the semi-abstract shapes of its endless orchards.The land is crocheted in a clearly textured pattern:
cotton – for olives,
chenille – for applesThe valleys are fluffy with blooming trees –
I want to stretch out my hand and pet them.The overwhelmingly-vivid green of the fields
screams for attention.Occasional ruins, softly mouldering,
become more picturesque by the century,
structure the landscape
and give the eye a rest. -
The Art of Walking on the Beach
The beach is a special place, a narrow path
between heights and depths, created by water.Precipitous cliffs on the right – concrete, huge, looming
their weight makes them feel acute and real, like pain.
It’s often said that life is pain – it is,
but lasting pain is only an illusion
created by the myth of lasting self.
But so too is happiness – same logic
applies.
Avoiding one and chasing after other –
a looser’s game.
You stop the chase and acquiesce to pain.
It lays quiescent
and underpins your joy.Enormous sea on the left – deep, silent, inchoate,
seamlessly transforming into sky.
Three container ships in undifferentiated sea-sky,
like ducks over the fireplace.
Familiar, ridiculous and safe,
creating anchor point
for frightened gaze
that’s lost in space and finding you in time –
the time of progress.So you progress –
you walk along the beach,
twixt depths and heights,
abandon and despair,
between deficiency and excess,
the middle way, the golden mean of Greeks.
Temerity-timidity
not much
to choose between –
one consonant, two vowels.
The trick is not to chose or compromise
but merely to tread between the two,
not enter the extremes,
keep in the middle,
create the path anew with every move.What you really need is a thin line of firm sand,
between loose dry and slippery wet,
easier to walk on.
Someone to hold by the hand,
to not have to look down for solid footing,
to see all that beauty.Extremes are always ugly,
beauty is
in golden mean,
in-sink
and in-between,
a pattern in complexity, a path
that unifies variety and us. -
Canterbury tales
When age is but a litany of loss,
your life reduced to sorting through the dross
of past achievements,
when the age is grim,
the time is to become a piligrim.Pligrim-age, a chance to re-assess
priorities, to re-address the mess
of habits and regrets and to redress
the wounds inflicted on yourself and others
by you and mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers –
the loved and hated ones,
the ones who form you
and whom you shape.
The people who will mourn you
day in and out,
as you live and breathe
they mourn who you were and what is.
What might have been…
one can but disappoint
while one is living.
Death creates a point
of no return,
no future and no past.
No possibility of loss at last.
Woebegon – for woe to be gone
we stop the clock at death and then move on.Obituaries are but tales that bend
realities into the shape of stories
including start, the middle and the end
that banishes not sadness, but the worries
and when the last uncertainty is gone
piligrimage is finished.
Life is done.
