Words inviting, the eyes accepted
the spirit willing, the heart exalted
the mind laboring, the brain revolted
against the lust of learning to be learned;
Woe was to her as her will yet essayed
Amid the vertigo of cogitation whirled
Like a never-ending merry-go-around
Swiveling her head in pandemonium.
P.S.: It would have been my first day of returning to the office after the partial end of stay-home order in California had my brother not told me of a civil unrest situation in Downtown LA where my job was located; the subway station I always use was closed, and a curfew would be enforced in LA Counties starting from 6:00 PM, which would affect my returning home via trains.
Behind all this commotion lies another intermittently continuous police brutality exercised against the socially disenfranchised or marginalized – or to put it more blatantly – invisible, and therefore ignorable. The demonstrations were egged on by the inhumanly aggravated handling by the police of George Floyd, a former promising college basketball student who had eked out living by working as a security guard until he was laid off due to Covid-19 lockdown.
I don’t care what Floyd’s past sins are. I don’t need to know his character assessment to reason the initiation of Floyd’s arrestment by the police in the first place. What I see from the video of his undignified death posted on the New York Times attests to the manifestation of how prejudice aided by the unbridled zealous passion of the heated moment can lead to the destruction of humanity. The more I watch the tragedy, the more I see the man’s pathos and the oppressor’s inhumanity. How could you do that? This alone matters to me. Hence this poem is my elegy to Mr. Floyd.
A puerile quest for a mirage, he rebukes
A pristine request of the heart, she decries
and begins a Ballard of a plain girl unknown;
Since her star in the Milky Way lost
its trail of Manifest Destiny shining the brightest,
the heiress bereft of her heavenly bequest
Without a speck of stardust has not been
As others were – she has not seen
As others saw – she has not known
As others knew- she still can not find
Where the tides of the ocean by wind
Arise, rush, roll, and reach with the surge
The silent silverly soil with the urge
When the lost high star finds her at last
And returns her overdue gifts of the best.
P.S. I feel intimately acquainted with Charlotte Bronte, her fictional alter ego Jane Eyre, and Janice Sessions, the plain girl created by Arthur Miller in their quiet deportment, delicate feminity, sentimental loneliness, and plaintive want of beauty. They are, in fact, my spiritual sisters in whom I can confide my inmost feelings, repressed emotions, and provocative thoughts guarded by my own conceptions against the acerbic opinions of the brutish, insensitive rabble. Nevertheless, the aforesaid sisters all had the breakthroughs that led them to fortune, luck, happiness however it might have lasted or whatever they might have been. I feel that I am kept away from anything wonderful or even remotely felicitous ever happening to me by some unseen forces of godly or evil beings. Alas, woe is to me! Shakespeare believed that our lives are governed by the stars above us and that there are tides in the affairs of man, which taken at the right time, they will lead man to fortune. What with such cold reception of my first published e-book and what with my regret of having published it at first, I wonder when I can meet my tides and sail away into the wide ocean to reach the land of my destiny.
Dear Reader: Hey, there! Thanks for visiting my blog and reading my post. And if you express it by pressing the button into the bargain, my spirit will surely be uplifted from the rut of my so-called life. And if you are further intrigued by my e-book recently published on Amazon Kindle and drop just a few lines of your thoughts about the story upon reading (but no words of derision or sarcasm), I will feel like a millionaire without the actual sort of money in my bank account. It’s only 57 pages in total, so the book won’t take much of your precious time. Just click on the below book cover with one touch of your fingertip, and it will lead you to the place where the story begins via wondrous witchcraft. Many thanks for reading with my whole heart! Best, Stephanie
Enchanting, Intoxicating, Fascinating,
Enveloped in a trance of fragrance
As a sweet mirage of romance floating
Up to her lustrous eyes welled with pearls
Of liquid dreams, misty wishes in beads
Of bubbled evanescence that flashed upon
Her watery eyes sparkling like diamonds,
A sweet vision of Beauty descends upon
Her lithe figure wrapped in lovely heaps
Of Roses, Bergamots, Jasmins, and Peaches
In Every Possible Variety of Pleasures.
P.S.: This is a rather playful limerick that came upon my mind during bathing. The new set of bathing kits was filled with wonderfully lovely scents extracted from the aforesaid flora, which instantly uplifted my spirit. I felt like bathing in a fairy lake hidden in a magic forest or Aphrodite’s Beach in Cyprus with the glamorous spell cast on me that would be unbroken – forever.
The days on earth ended
And the days in Afterlife began
As the Final Judgment of Osiris,
The Lord of the Underworld
To weigh the sins of the man
On the Scale of Two Truths
Against the Sacred Feather
In the Hall of Goddess of Truth
Waited for him to say “Never!”
The assisting gods recited
The long line of sins on earth
To which the man answered,
“No, I had committed none,
None of the sins from birth to death.”
Then Osiris ordered the goddess
To put the man’s heart on the scale
And the Sacred Feather in her arms
To be on the other side of the scale.
The heart as light as the Sacred Feather
Kept the Perfect Balance of the Scale,
And the Supreme Judge decided to declare
The man to be true of voice by the Scale
And allowed him to enter in eternal bliss
Celestial Garden among the Stars
That never died but lived forever
Sailing as his happy heart wished
And filled with Eternal Euphoria.
P.S.: This poem was based upon my reading of the ‘Book of the Dead,’ an ancient Egyptian guide to the Underworld instructing the dead what to expect, where to go, and how to behave when entering the Underworld. The ancient Egyptians regarded death as new life, the beginning of the Afterlife where the souls of the virtuous dead lived in a heavenly landscape that looked so much like Egypt on earth. The blissful afterlife was meritorious by the ruling of Osiris, the supreme ruler of the Underworld, who questioned the souls of the dead according to a long list of sins that mankind was prone to commit by nature and put their negation of sins on a test by putting each of their hearts on the divine scale to weigh against Maat’s Feather.” Maat was the goddess of truth, and as she put the heart on the other side of the scale, the balance would remain the same if the heart was free of sins. Only such a sinless, weightless heart would give the soul of the man a passport to Paradise. Fascinating.
Like a wandering lonely cloud
Skybound, Softbound, Spellbound,
I walked down to the lonely street
In the silver shimmering daylight,
Lingering in the horizon beyond
Reflecting on the shining pond.
P.S. I took a walk at the park this beautiful afternoon and saw a pretty pond therein. It was sparkling with the reflection of sunlight, which made me wonder if this had been what Anne of Green Gables might have seen on the way to the Green Gables with Matthew from the train station and named it “Lake of Shimmering Waters”.
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
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