Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: creative writing

  • the secret of the sea

    Scylla-and-Charybdis

    In the wilderness of the great ocean

    Lies a secret script of the Fate of Man

    Sealed in the silence of tidal motion

    In dissimulation of the opprobrious plan

    Harboring the secrecy of the Age of Man

    That gods so have kept to themselves alone.

     

    The Ages of Man, the Plays of Man

    On the Stages of Acts in Humanity –

    Those gods wrote and watched for fun

    In the theater of Comedy and Tragedy

    As the Wheel of Fortune decided what

    Would be played the next, and whatnot.

     

    The heart of the ocean sends a pulse thru me

    Of the secret hidden in the watery main

    With the sunny breeze that pushed Odyssey

    To sail forth against the forces of the divine

    To find and write a new Age of Man to witness

    The victory between the Scylla and Charybdis.

     

    P.S.: This is a poem written out of my existential crisis in the reflection of Herodutus’s theory of the Age of Man. I am not a fatalist but a believer of luck as Shakespeare was. I believe that time and chance are what ascribe to the fulfillment of your ends in life or for the nonce. Didn’t Thomas Alba Edison also corroborate that a genius is made of 1 percent of ingenuity and 99 percent of efforts? I want to embark on an Odyssey to claim my own destiny.

  • vertigo of words

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    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.

     

  • gentle giant

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    A gentle giant in the maze of darkness

    Sees the darkest corruption of the heart

    alloyed in the putrid puss of proud violence

    Writhing his pulsation of life like a serpent

    Twisting the veins that carry life to his breath

    Pounding the dome of his sovereign palace

    In a morbid frisson of the ecstatic dance of death

    Amid the cries of the man in a maze of disgrace

    Unarmored, unguarded, unprotected, unheard

    As the rampant madness of murder with passion

    Possesses the man with the corrupt heart blinded

    By outgrown white heat of hatred with unreason.

     

    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. 

  • Look with thy mind, not thine eyes

    Dear Reader,

    Hey, there! Thanks for visiting my blog and reading my post. And if you express it by pressing the Like button into the bargain, my spirit will surely be uplifted from the rut of my so-called life. 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, I will feel like a millionaire without the actual sort of money in my bank account.

    Well, it’s been two weeks or so since I published the e-book on Kindle, but a reception reminds me of the frightfully cold winter of New York City I have experienced. No one seems to read even the first page thereof, according to my Kindle Direct stats. Inevitably, a good book will find its readers without eye-catching promotions or pitiful solicitations for readership based on sympathy. But honestly, I don’t feel comfortable canvassing readership by either of the means. And yet, since I am a girl of contrasts, my ambition for full recognition of my work refuses to be humble and thus commands my unwilling spirit to write this letter to you.

    It’s only 57 pages in total, so the book won’t take much of your precious time. And I must admit that the formatting of the text may seem obtrusively arcane and dense, but Reader, look not with thine eye but with thy mind. The story is worth reading amid flotsam and jetsam of textual wonderland. 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 

     

     

  • Why I write

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    My very first e-book now available on Amazon Kindle

    Dear Readers,

    Howdy to all. Thanks for visiting my hermit blog either by happenstance or curiosity. Writing has always been my favorite activity by which I feel meaningful and truthful. It has been a magic marble, an alchemical mode of transforming myself into all that I want to become or capable of becoming via the magical process of words. As Francis Bacon corroborates, reading makes a full person, writing makes a whole person by expressing the self to the extent possible. I am not a great writer, but my passionate volition to express my inmost thoughts and feelings that strive for artistic manifestation exceeds such fear of public derision. This yearning for manifested creativity chimes the bell of Kurt Vonnegut’s benevolent adage: “To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”

    Hence I published my first-time official short fiction on Amazon Kindle that is available now for free. It’s a whimsical story without a complex plot about a young girl unsure of herself experiences a kind of Midsummer Night’s Dream or Rip Van Winkle’s fairy tale. This may sound audacious hyperbole, vis-a-vis the works of the geniuses in Literature, but the semblance of thematic and the author’s affinity for the brilliance of the great literature allow her to make a literary parallel thereto, so to speak.

    As some of you may know, English is not my mother tongue but a beloved adoptive linguistic child of mine that I love to nourish and nurture. That said, my first e-book is my attempt at producing a child of labor. This doesn’t surpass the degree of affection for this blog of mine, which is also a labor of love, but writing a book is certainly on a different spectrum of mental efforts.

    Solicitation of readership may come across as an aggressive way of forcing people to read what she writes because it may not satisfy the level of expectations that a reader has set as an intellectual or entertaining touchstone, which is why I find it hard to self-promote my e-book. And yet, despite my shyness fused with hesitation, I would like to request that you try my e-book and leave your feedback on Amazon after reading because that’s the way I can grow into and blossom into a beautiful literary rose in the future. Won’t you as a kindred writing pard throw me a rope of hope to climb up the Alpine Path? Many thanks in advance! 🙂

    Best regards,

    Stephanie

  • flowers of pleasure

     

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    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.