ahanu

Any Baha'is on this forum involved in artistic expression through poetry?

While reading the U.S. Baha'i news, I saw two articles on slam poetry. Def Jam poets regularly visit my college, so I have met a handful of them. Their storytelling inspires me to write about my own experiences in life. Spoken word resurrected poetry in the late 1980s and early 1990s, fusing poetry with performance art.

For those who do not know, one of the biggest poets in the spoken word realm is Anis Mojgani, a Baha'i. It's not uncommon for people to say, "Oh, I was inspired to write poetry after listening to Anis Mojgani!" I'm one of those people. His poetry can be found on Youtube, Pianofarm.com, Writebloody.com, and more. Here is a sample called "The Branches are Full and These Orchids Heavy," which I read from Rattle.com:

"gentlemen have you forgotten your god?

He weeps out loud
waiting for our dreams to grow like ears
while you are making ghosts out of people
making ghosts from your torah
your koran
your bibles

we have shaved our books down
swallowed them
so that the word of God
might flow through us
but the pages just sit in our bellies
speaking to us in dull murmurs as we sleep
we wonder what to do
make me understand
we wish to become one with our Lord
we hear the voices and think we know what they say
this
is the word of God
i hear this i heard this correctly
so we rise and try to translate this word
with the work
with the heart
we search the bed
through thighs
the blanket the leg the needle twist
fuck and the fuck you
curse of the moon
to find our Lord
and listen more proper-like
but our ears are too small
for our hearts to understand the humming of these sentences inside of us

we are trying to decipher the bang buck braille of Your silent throat Lord
but the voices grow and grow just as fuzzy
so we stand and go to the kitchen
and pick up knives to cut these voices out from inside
we stab ourselves
i must hear You
cutting the flap of our skins
the words twist on the floor of our homes
mixing their sounds with our blood
they drown
but it does not stop
i must hear you
we hear the same songs singing in the stomachs of others
so we grab more knives to cut those out
but there are more and more stomachs
—we need
bigger knives
we need soldiers tanks and missiles
but we still cannot make out the words
we need dead mothers
and children raped from searching
the hospitals are full and overflowing
from us trying to cut our God from our gut
with the blade the pipe
the fingernail twist of the drug
pushed and poked through the arm to the belly
to throw Him up
in the bang of the scream
we find our savior
the shell in the chamber
is a quiet plea to a distant God
asking for us to be remembered by Him
through the tire tread
through the smoke of the tank
the crunch of the skull
through the babies we bury beneath us
we empty their tiny limbs to see if a scrap of our Lord still lingered
somewhere inside there
we clutch throats pistols and palms in the same two handed clasp of prayer
staring into the mirror
we see crypts
fondling the marble of our hearts like they were mausoleums
we are ghosts hungry
for something bigger then what our mouths are kissing

let me see You
let me see You Lord
i have balanced in the middle of the question
black as my eye
beaten by Your hymn
i am holding still

so
go ahead
you gentle

men of God
you tender sinners

take your rifles
raise to my gut and fire on

hear the song more clearly
it does not sing what you wish it did

it is too big for us to see a letter of it
so do not even try

cut Him from me

i wish to drape His face with my kisses
and finally sleep softly"

tonyfish58

ahanu - How about this thread from a few weeks ago

Poems Inspired By the Faith of Baha'ullah

Cheers Tony

BruceDLimber

Just remember Long's Observation:

A poet who reads verse in public may have other nasty habits.

:-S

Bruce

tonyfish58

Bruce ???? Why

Tahirih was a wonderful writer of Poetry

Regards Tony

BruceDLimber

Quote:

Originally Posted by tonyfish58 Tahirih was a wonderful writer of Poetry.

Perhaps she didn't read verse in public. :-)

Bruce

tonyfish58

Bruce - Maybe you need to open your horizons







Poetry as Revelation

Translation of Baha'u'llah's Rashh-i Ama (The Mist of Unknown)

Have Fun

Cheers Tony

BruceDLimber

[QUOTE=tonyfish58;28258]Maybe you need to open your horizons.

And maybe YOU need to worry less about a post that was obviously intended as humor.

tonyfish58

[QUOTE=BruceDLimber;28266]Ditto (That's why Happy face)

No personal attack intended

What is very interesting though is how few posters there are to the topic of poetry. I put one thread up and no one has added to it

This thread has had little response.

Shame - It is an excellent way to express the feelings of the Heart

Regards Tony

Truthseeker96

This poem has a meanin to it where i see it happing every day all around the world ( sorry if i got the worg message) to me this poem tells how people are all searching for God but in the worg ways. Some people just cut him out of their lives when they give up and others try to completly understand the unknowable but they keep cuttin away in war and drugs lokking.....! Well at least thats what igot from that. What was your guys understanding of the poem?

ahanu

The first stanza reminds me of some self-created Sheol, for he writes, "you are making ghosts out of people / making ghosts from your torah / your koran / your bibles," as if the person is in the "land of forgetfulness" (Ps. 88.12), where God can't be heard or communicated with in any way. Everything real becomes unreal. It fits with the first question: "gentlemen have you forgotten your god?" So there is this self-created barrier, a self-created Sheol, that shuts off man from God. Notice the "gentlemen" are not growing, because we are told God is weeping, waiting for our dreams to grow. Meanwhile, we "stab" ourselves, "cut" ourselves, and gouge out our flesh with "knives," as if we are becoming smaller and smaller until we consume ourselves with this search to understand God. We "drown" the "words" with our blood, and then after we silence the voice inside, we hear "the song" singing in others, so we must try to cut it out too. Then, maybe we can "hear" more clearly. Even after the poet's sacrifice, we still can't hear the "song," "the words." It's as if the "gentlemen" have fallen into a deep, dark whirlpool that is pulling themselves and everything around them into nothingness, or a ghost-like world, where everything is unreal. It's as if they are running around in circles while they are falling--all while trying to "hear" their God.

Why do the gentlement not listen to their own voice, words, utterances?

This reminds me of what Abdu'l-Baha said about the compass:

And however much they may fly with triumphant wings in the limitless space of what is knowable and observable, they will read naught but the letters of the book of their own selves. Thus it is that He has said: "Read your own book, your self is sufficient to give an account against you today [49]." For example, consider a circle: however much a compass moves, it can only move around the point which is the centre of the circle. This illumined verse, in the reality of angelic souls, has the same role as that point, for all of the senses and understanding of man revolve around that Divine verse.

Perhaps the whole point of the poem is this: we forget God when we forget our own selves.