Back to summer 2009 index
Home Page | 2009 Ghazals | 2008 Ghazals | Prose | Links | Information | Email | Archives
You’ve let me down. You don’t seem to measure up.
Up yours old man, I don’t mean to measure up.
In mother’s arms I’m always welcome, no need
To earn her love. Yet, I dream to measure up.
I left everything behind for California gold,
There’s no return, I need this seam to measure up.
For every honest system, some’ll try to game it.
I’ll be true, let others scheme to measure up.
Football or sales, bowling, army or prayer.
How can I best help my team to measure up?
Thanks for the method, fathers, in this madness
An offered word: do what you deem to measure up.
Note the cheekbone, a slash of blush to determine gender.
Is a woman only an offering of artwork, her wonder better with color?
In the shoulder, there is a dowager: the hump’s progress waiting for
the day the body declares elderly the new way of waiting for death.
Upon the lips, there is a mist of memory, of men, of miscellany,
the way the mouth opens again, again for food, for pleasure, for pain.
Kolhed eyes look quite out of place. Something too pale on the plane,
the bridge of the nose, the forehead starkly magnified by a darker line.
The face is a canvas: a clichéd slate we endlessly capture, decorate.
Its palette established by men, women: we never know the difference.
Quiet truths rise with evening's fall from grace and lie
Morning beckons dreams to fly in life's face and lie
No more, no less this everlasting absent time
What demise will life's work adorn, efface and lie?
Win for me love's lavender bounty in daylight
My prize, I pray, this time I won't deface and lie
Soon it will begin, the promised epoch of naught
Today's still moment must know this disgrace and lie
Worlds turn, Aslam, dancing with all of your past loves
Would that you could eke out one true embrace and lie
The walls are covered with earth and straw,
these school walls built from stone, earth, and straw.
With mountain weather outside — white, cutting, and raw,
the interior is warmed by sun on stone, earth and straw.
The success is more than builders foresaw,
when they first dreamed to build with stone, earth, and straw.
The classes inside are fulfilling needs,
hope and dreams grow from stone, earth and straw.
Soon work may begin again, with a planting of seeds,
to build another school for children, from stone, earth, and straw.
A site about the Sun School. There's more information here.
In the beginning there was no breeding of sticks;
once upon a time I was ungrown of sticks.
As Gila’s mouth opens, its snow freezes my hands;
He sees his breath, a conjuring of sticks.
His bent fingers curving into silent eggs?
Gila curling around his nest-caldron of sticks.
The early light boils around my wrists;
I can’t speak, but I’ll leave a song of sticks.
In his cave, beneath a spawn of stones,
I watch him grow, a cancering of sticks.
Days flagging away, hands fluttering good-bye.
Gila holds me, a chaise-longue of sticks.
He wants one last memory, an Avalon of skins.
The past lizards around like a requiem of sticks.
Gila whispers into my body-hole now;
I’ve curved to cup, a jeweled colon of sticks.
The twilight tracks me, a spotted lizard stalking;
Gila sniggers and stiffens into a crossbones of sticks.
Gila licks its lips and waits for the end.
Can I still remember — even sown of sticks?
How do we measure up? By what scale are we measured? One way we measure ourselves and each other is through our faces. Nicole Cartwright Denison's sensitive reading of Robert Mapplethorpe's "Self-Portrait, 1980," measures Mapplethorpe's ambiguous self-measuring. "And Lie" also pivots on an ambiguity: the double and different meanings of "lie." One speaks a falsehood; the other stretches out, prone or supine, alone or in company. The usage of "lie," is in "to lie down," is fading away; with "lay" taking its place. I regret the lose of shades of meaning in this linguistic change, shades that enrich this ghazal.
The resonance of the radif, "stone, earth, and straw," makes the poetic foundation of this ghazal. Take a look at the picture accessed by the link in the note. This school is made of substances elemental in human experience. If "Stone, Earth, and Straw" are externally elemental, it seems to me that Gila's sticks are internally elemental, or, perhaps they exist in the fluid boundary between outer fact and inner feeling.
An interview in English with Jan Tilinger, the school's designer.
The walls mentioned are an outside one of stone, an inside one of adobe-type earthen blocks, and a core of straw- for insulation- between the two. The building has a long wall of windows on the south side to supply as much solar heat and natural lighting as is available. The structure is also set down into the ground several feet to take advantage of the benefits of earth-sheltering.
The Surya School home page (In Czech . . . lots of photos, though. )
I emailed this piece to the Surya School website, and Jan Tilinger- the young engineer behind the project- replied within minutes, asking if he could post this piece on the NGO's website. I am quite flattered by this, since this is only the third ghazal I've worked on, and gave him permission. I've revised it a bit since then.
I would like to add that this school house is in a village, Kargyak, which is at the feet of the Himalayas in Jammu-Kashmir,India.
It is at an elevation of 4,200 meters /13,778.5 feet. Two-point-six miles . . . .
That's one high school . . . .
Higher than most of the Rocky Mountains here in B.C.
The village is a five day hike from the end of the nearest road, and Jan informed me they packed the glass for the solar window wall in on horseback.