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

Tag: Poetry

  • Dusk murmuration

    I hear the echoes of the screaming skies

    From a distance where a day goes to die

    As Helios’s chariot finishes a day’s race

    With a long scarlet tail of the glowing smokes

    Spreading into heavens and earth ablaze.

    The dusk murmuration has already left me

    In the lurch of neverending longing for love –

    The sweetness of spirit, the warmth of soul

    Carried on the wings of messengers of fate:

    Owls, Swifts, Blackbirds, Cranes, Starlings… –

    The lonely souls of the dead now together

    Fly the memories of tears and heartaches

    Into the world of nature that never fails them.

    So I wait for a murmuration all over again

    Standing on a top of the hill or on a high cliff

    To catch the screaming flock of ghosts in flight

    And wish that I could become one anon.  

  • If

    What if the present is not present but dreamt?
    What if the past is not past but future forecast?
    For all of this, I am living now is reenacted
    Of the previous life, I once lived forgotten
    But not erased in the paroxysm of sadness
    That my soul cannot bear without tears
    And the heart refuses to shield in reason
    Because the grief weighs against hope –
    The forced illusory vision to staged elysium –
    With every fate already weaved, cut, and shipped
    To Destiny from Departure to Arrival, and again
    Till the Moon orbits the Earth for 1000 years
    To live 1000 lives elsewhere in whatever forms,
    Each bearing pieces of cracked memories
    Reflecting the central fractures of the pasts
    In the circle of life, the wheel of lives.
    Alas, poor soul! I know her, dear reader!
    Pity her not with the condescension of charity!
    But give her a rope at the end of a life
    Not to fall into the cruel rat race of the rut
    Not now, not ever, once, and that’s all for good.

  • the bluebird

    The bird in a cage
    Trills on a swing.
    Delight beckons.

    Under the dome of the spirit
    In the palace of the soul
    The bird tells the future.

  • frightful

    High towering ire beneath the mountains of tidal waves whirling,
    Darkness howling, ascending to light moaning, descending,
    Blackest somber fear turning into whitest hot hubris roaring,
    The spirit in the fetters bursts upon the furious waters, revolting.

    The souls of the dead rising from the abyss and walking,
    Midnight, moonlight, and starlight upon the waters shining,
    Heaven gaping then cracking, earth laying and embracing,
    The spirit with the wings clipped begins to flutter and leap, rejoicing.

  • ‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseini – book review

    The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    Writing is the most solipsistic and democratic means to make people discover your secret histories or inner world so that they can understand why you are what you are. That is what Khaled Hosseini does enchantingly in The Kite Runner. It is a bildungsroman story reminiscent of the Au revoir, Les Enfantes-Esque ambiance surrounding the narrative of a grown-up boy who wants to reconcile with the stupendousness of mistaken guilt becoming a malady of the heart. But that doesn’t mean it is all too surreal or stark grim to make an accidental reader think it is a wrong choice. On the contrary, Hosseini vividly conjures up the faces and scenes, resurrecting the spirits of the places and times, by putting together the tesserae of his memories in this rivetingly heartrending read.

    The book incorporates the sociological theory of symbolic interactionist perspective focused on the relationships among individuals within a society and how political changes affect the lives of individuals and the sense of who we are and our relationships to others. The story’s narrator, a young Afghan boy of the upper-class named Amir Agha, gives the reader a ride to his childhood in Kabul to show the halcyon days of pre-soviet and Taliban reigned Afghanistan. First, you will see him and his best friend Hassan, a Hazara servant boy in his house, wallowing in reading stories and lost in kite flying. Then and thereafter, Hassan becomes a victim of the most horrific act committed by the half-German blue-eyed Afghan boy threatening him to win kite. Amir’s retrospective narrative becomes his public confession and ablation, all of which is a combined act of purging out the painful memories of the past and exorcising his demons tormenting him with the guilt of jealousy, ignorance, and cowardice. The whole narrative then becomes a plethora of pathos and empathy, resulting in a cornucopia of forgiveness and sympathy, drifting it all in a high-flying kite once and for all.

    It is a fitting story in this particular time of Afghanistan history and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s winning of 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature for his achievement of universalizing human travails transcendent of racial, cultural, and geographical differences. Vivacious at times but dolorous at most, the Kite Runner is synthetic literature that wears habiliments of memoir and novel. There truth and fiction dissolve into one another anchored in real life with factual geographical and historical facts smoothly amalgamated in the individual narrative account, which reminds me of Herodotus’s “Histories.” Or it is an alluringly pioneering memoir-making that resembles Realistic Fiction. For whatever it is, the Kite Runner bestrides the aisles of contemporary literature sections, alluring the public with simple language that magically juxtaposed in beautiful prose style with lyrical quality, all soul and mind in the marks upon pages evocative of the spirits of the memories materializing.



    View all my reviews

  • at the sea

    I have seen the insidious sea
    Lull the children of the shore
    With the sweet aeolian lullaby
    And the pretty nymphs appear
    From the bottom of the ocean
    To bring them into the palace
    Where their father, Poseidon
    Keeps the souls of the sea
    As is his mighty brother Zeus
    For the world above and beyond;
    Woe betides those who forego
    The fates of the young souls,
    For their grandfather, whose eyes
    See the insidious machination
    Fascinate the innocent hearts
    In the whirlpool of rapid waves!
    The old man’s fury is greater
    Than the furious god of the sea;
    He dives into the angry waters,
    Fighting against the god in spades
    With his bare arms cutting the waves
    Like swords that could kill ghosts
    And wins of his two grandchildren;
    From the god whose wrath sees
    No end until it grows the waves
    Into the myrmidons of madness
    And carries the old man into the abyss.

    P.S.: This poem is based on my reading of a newspaper article that a sixty-one-year-old British grandfather died while trying to save his two grandchildren, aged seven and ten, in the sea off the island of Crete, Greece. The man got into the sea, fighting with the rapid, treacherous waves like Caligula, who declared war on the sea, whipping the waves furiously to invade Britain. Finally, his grandchildren got out safely, but alas, the old man was engulfed by the wrath of furious waves and drawn to the bottom of the sea. I could not just forego my feelings upon reading the story with poetic elements that also bring me the mythological image of Laocoon, the Trojan priest punished by Poseidon who sent the great serpent engulfing him and his two young sons for his discovering the Greek ruse about the wooden Trojan horse. Hence this little poem is in memory of the brave and loving grandfather.