I've been reading haiku a lot lately and posted a number of poems by masters such as Buson, Issa, Shiki, Basho, and Taneda on my social media accounts Facebook and Twitter. They are also my favorite composers of haiku.
I briefly studied haiku sometime in probably high school, but I remember feeling intimidated by it. My teacher tried to keep us within the 5-7-5 syllable pattern which is the Japanese method, but I've learned that the rules are not so strict in English. So tonight I tried my hand at some.
I've written in the past that my poetry blog would not just contain poetry written by me but occasionally poetry written by others.
Some weeks ago I saw a quote on my Facebook timeline by someone named Mahmoud Darwish. I think I'd seen quotes by him on there before. This last time I decided to do research. I was immediately excited to learn that he was a famous poet. Wikipedia writes that he is considered by some to be the national poet of Palestine.
There are videos of him on YouTube reciting poems. I've read a few of his poems online and want to read more. I've listened to a song called Passport which is a poem by the Lebanese singer Marcel Khalife based on a poem by Mahmoud Darwish. I first heard this song at the end of the movie Amreeka, which a movie I've watched twice now and like very much. The characters are Palestinian, but I can relate to their sense of not feeling like they don't belong to their homeland or their adopted homeland in America. I love the main character Muna's optimism and perseverance through betrayal and disappointment.
I don't have it anywhere as difficult as their characters or as Mahmoud Darwish had, still I believe all alienation feels rather the same. Those who don't self-destruct learn to live through it, work through and around it, and if you have something of the creative in you, you begin to make something artistic out of it. You turn your tears into an artistic artifact. I decided to take the creative route because most of all I want to love my fellow humans which is one of the hardest tasks of all.
I will continue to humanize even the enemy... The first teacher who taught me Hebrew was a Jew. The first love affair in my life was with a Jewish girl. The first judge who sent me to prison was a Jewish woman. So from the beginning, I didn't see Jews as devils or angels but as human beings. Several poems are to Jewish lovers. These poems take the side of love not war. ~ Mahmoud Darwish Here are two videos in English and Arabic of poems by Mahmoud Darwish with him reciting the poems in Arabic.
X I survived temptations, the battering of Satan on my mind and body. Once four men came to my cell to rob me. I beat them down, dragged them back to Sketis for judgment.
I am a penitent. It would be hypocritical with such a past life as mine to be the final judge of these men. I place them in your hands.
Moses, this is another test you have passed.
I looked at Abbot Isidore. The bound robbers looked at me. He is that Moses who was the greatest, most feared of thieves? The abbot and brothers standing there nodded. If God changed Moses, perhaps God can change us. Crawling up to the abbot, allow us to stay with you. Confessing their polluted lives, they too became monks.
XI
Years of spiritual struggle, walking the graveyards of sin in my mind, my hair turned white like a spring cloud. I became a priest. One day I was called. The issue was a brother who had committed a great sin. Theft, ran away, and a woman. Sketis' only material wealth stolen, a golden bowl.
In my madness for her, the bowl was taken I ran off to Alexandria. My conscience and my vows forced me back.
Paul, what do you say? Alexandros, what do you say? Michael, what do you say? Dionysus, what do you say? On and on. Moses, what do you say?
I say I will leave and come back after awhile.
In the back of the monastery, a large basket. I cut a small hole in it, filled it with sand, hoisted it on my back, went inside.
This basket contains my sins that are multitudes. They trickle out and I cannot see them. Now you ask me to judge someone else's sins?
The brother was forgiven.
XII
Abbott Isidore awaken me early. The roosters barely began crowing. Come Moses with me to the roof.
Father are you preparing to toss this old sinner from there?
Now Moses! He grinned and lifted a skinny finger in chastisement.
Yellow, orange, blue bands scrolled on the horizon. Brother Moses, the rays of the sun creeps in and slowly melt away the night starting a new day. The same way with the contemplative life. Trials like stormy seas. It creeps into a life until eventually the perfect contemplative is born.
XIII
I am an old man now. I feel my age for the first time. I am thankful for the work God weaved in me. A man feared and hated, led seventy bandits, to a man respected and loved, the spiritual father of seventy monks. A new man. The coin had flipped over to its better side. Only God's love and my silent suffering and shame could perform such a change. All pride was destroyed and erased in a spiritual sandstorm. I felt humbled.
Because of visits a few times to an Orthodox church I began to research some Orthodox saints. While researching I came across an African saint named St. Moses the Black. This was of high interest to me since I am African-American, and I keep insisting that Christianity is an Eastern religion, something that many Westerners seem to forget and in the process take the life out of it. Also Christian monasticism had its roots in Africa. This is a poem in fourteen parts about St. Moses the Black (330-405). After being a very mean character he found God and became an ascetic and a priest. This is my poetic recreation of his life story. I embellished some events and left out a few others. Since this is a long poem, I will post it serially over the coming weeks. I feel that a blog is not the best milieu for long topics, but still I wanted to share this poem here.
I
My head rests in a pool of blood as ruffians and thugs rush and entwine like rats looting our little holy retreat. This is where it begins for me.
II
St. Moses the Black was once a very, very angry man. A Nubian aurochs, ancient bull waiting and aching to crash out of his pen. Toss the world on his horns. A robber, a ruffian voice an earthquake. Evil was his tonic, the sewage in his soul.
III
I was a slave of an Egyptian official. He feared, despised me. Disgust and pleading in his voice one day after a theft and rumor of a murder. Moses go. You break things. You break lives. You take things. You break my life. Moses go. He pointed outside, golden ring on an elegant finger.
IV
I left my master's house. The air of freedom was good. It coursed through my lungs while evil coursed through my soul. In a palm populated valley near the Nile, bandits lived. I joined them. They welcomed me first with suspicion, then fear and respect. Stronger, more fearsome, blacker than them all. I became leader of the mixed bunch of beige, brown, red, black men. Terror was our business, robbery our litany. The wailing of women, the cry of infants as we cut down husbands and fathers along the Nile, in the valleys, oases, hills and mountains. I created with pleasure many widows and orphans, stole much timid livestock. My boys and I laughed, ran, rode off as village or lone hut went up in flames, taking all the animals and goods that we could. I lived like a king one week, the next week a pauper. My stolen goods all poured into alcohol, women, gambling.
