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

Tag: Poetry

  • My Bluebird

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    I walked in all wither in the dark alley

    A long, narrow, serpentine labyrinth

    Of fake hubris, false hopes in dismay

    as Reason began to revolt from within.

     

    Then I heard the melody from yonder

    High over the mean concrete fences

    Like a dryad’s melody from a flower

    twinkling twilights on her wings.

     

    There I arose from the dark slowly

    And walked into the sound of light

    In the felicity of the unknown suddenly

    Beckoning me with the promise of delight.

     

    As I came to the corner of the maze

    Beyond the alley of another corner

    There it was in the distant misty haze.

    I saw a bluebird waiting for me pretty, ever.

     

    P.S.: The bluebird, as a symbol of hope and happiness because of its fanciful prettiness and rare presence in nature, has been a popular element of folklore. Albeit the French version by Mme D’Aulnoy is famous, my choice is a Russian version of the bluebird, as called upon by Anton Denikin, a military leader of the Volunteer Army in the Russian Civil War during the ill-fated Ice March. And this is my version of recreating the bluebird as a paragon of beautiful hope, the last saving grace for the forsaken left in Pandora’s Box, twinkling like the stars in the Milky Way embroidered on the nightly sky.

  • bohemian, ballad, zeitgeist

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    On the day she left the gallery 

    Of the faces ancient and agelast

    She went to the shop of curiosity

    And bought a new perfume fragrant

    Of Rose, Acacia, Lilac, and Bergamot, 

    From which a Sylph floated up to her

    Thru the dusty air of a city street

    Wrapping her in the perfume of love

    Undressing her in the nature of love. 

  • marrow, whisper, porcelain

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    Into the silence of the gentle night

    The soft breeze of the distant forest

    Blows sweet to the leaves of the trees

    Which begin to flutter in the gentle wind

    Whispering to the lunar beauty alone

    Listening to her susurrus of chaste heart. 

  • Majestic, Tepid, Light

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    The dome of the spirit

    The palace of the heart

    Her sovereign realm is

    Locked in the darkness

    of the madness of loneliness,

    casting the eternal spells

    of sadness on the queen

    unwanted, unseen, unheard,

    betrayed by false courtesans,

    courtiers, father, mother, all,

    till the light of love casts over

    the weeping queen’s head softly

    with a gentle touch of the sun

    in all sweetness evermore.

  • the ugly princess

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    Many moons and suns ago when the Nymphs of the West

    Tended and guarded the Garden of the Hesperides,

    In the city of Alcantara, there lived a king, the most

    Loving father of all who loved his only child in spades,

    So utterly ugly in every possible variety of imaginations

    That her presence made the beholders into muted stones.

    They called her Ugly Altamira, but the king called her Love,

    Showering her with Bounty of Beauty, Treats of Tenderness,

    Telling her how beautiful she was as a magic spell of love.

     

    Whereas the princess in her father’s glamour spell drove men away –

    Prince Alanbam, the hundred knights in armors, and the barber –

    All fleeing with horrors of taking her hand and kissing her lips.

    Then the king told the princess to marry the Church in a veil

    To which she retorted, “I will not marry the Church but find

    A husband in the land beyond the sea where the day never dawns

    And the night is eternal, so beauty is seen common in darkness.”

     

    Therewith, the princess amounted her beautiful white horse

    For departure to the land of equality when the elegant figure

    Suddenly appeared at the gate of the castle whose visage was

    Beaming with beatific beauty with a voice sonorous and melodious.

    Felisberto, the blind fiddler, exclaimed in the bliss of love mysterious:

    “Princess, you need not look anywhere else but to behold one

    To whom night and day, ugliness and beauty are all but one.

    Since all your suitors are too bashful to marry you so beautiful,

    Allow me to be of your service as a husband who makes you happy,

    For beauty is as beauty does, so is the pleasure of love in all fancy.

     

    Thereupon, the princess dismounted her beautiful white horse

    walked to the handsome fiddler and touched the beautiful face

    of the man with tenderness and love full of passion and felicity

    by which the man became ecstatic with the sensuous touch

    of the delicate beauty of the princess and kissed her tenderly.

     

    Thereafter, the princess and the fiddler married and lived happily

    In a castle from the window from which they could see the Hesperides

    Water the garden of divine golden apples and dance around the tree always.

     

    P.S. The subject matter of this poem comes from a Spanish folktale of ‘The Ugly Princess” who was so homely that everyone except her loving father couldn’t stand the sight of her presence as though she had been a violation against the natural law. The father’s indoctrination of confidence as a positive reinforcement into his daughter is worth noting as a proto-clinical behavioral therapy in relieving the patient’s depressive obsession with her unattractive physical trait. In fact, the king’s therapy was so successful that the daughter’s identification with prime beauty that was deemed too high for the underserved was remarkable and seemed simply magical.

    From movies to novels to the profiles of the authors and of the administrators of social media platforms, the social spencersim of the beautiful champions the law of attraction, whether or not you will vehemently disagree with that usual enforcement of the mantra of self-confidence equipped with a feminist armor and a diversity-rule shield. For beauty gives confidence to a woman in a social setting, and that’s the truth. No wonder folklore treats beautiful women as a rewarding virtue that handsome men are worth fighting for. 

    Although the ending of the Ugly Princess is unrefutably sweet and happy, I cannot help but relate it to the ending of  ‘Plain Girl’, by Arthur Miller – review in which the not so attractive but intelligent protagonist Janice Sasson ultimately finds the consummate love of eros and psyche in the figure of the handsome blind musician. Does the happiness that Janice so cherished have to be in the form of blindness? Can’t a woman deprived of glamour and the matching social adroitness meet and fall in love with a handsome man full of warmth, tenderness, and understanding?  Does it have to be a blind man to whom nothing is different, hence an absence of beauty is acceptable?  Does love agree at best only at night?

  • ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, by Washington Irving – essay

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    Shakespeare once said that ghosts were amiable, harmless in want of company to console their haunting loneliness, lost in the crossroads between this world and that world. But that is not the case of the headless ghosts – the angriest and most terrifying of all other specter ilks, evoking the most primitive sense of fear to the eyes of beholders by the sheer eeriness of the appearance.  Because they despaired and died in oft violent ways, the headless ghosts are putatively the most furious and vengeful with the domes of their souls forever lost. No wonder there are legends of headless knight riders prevalently existent in the universal world.

    Meet the famed headless nightrider of the Sleepy Hollow in New York. Originally hailed from a province of old Germany, he used to be a soldier fighting on the British side during the Revolutionary War who was decapacitated by an American cannonball. His battle buddies buried him without the missing shattered head. The residents of Sleepy Hollow believed that the soul of the unfortunate young German soldier risen from his grave by his supernatural ire burning with vengeance against the earthlings that killed him was restlessly riding his phantom horse at night furiously brandishing a Jack-o’-Lantern in a semblance of face made out of a displaced pumpkin as his a makeshift head, glowing in a flame of fury as to light his nightly way.

    The indelible image of the restive headless horseman is terrifically and vividly resurrected by the literary alchemy of the great American writer Washington Irving in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in which the unlikely protagonist of a meek, naive, willowy school teacher of New England by the name of Ichabod Crane stumbles into his frightful encounter with the Horseman on his fateful night during his doomed journey home. Woe betided the unfortunate benevolent schoolteacher believed to be spirited away with the headless horseman to the legion of wandering spirits in between the world of the living and that of the dead till the eternity.

    Apart from the spectral elements of the story, Irving’s characters in the story convey the displaced post-colonial sentiments of unease for the present and uncertainty for the future in the chaotic aftermath of the war that was supposed to beget promptly promising bright outcomes to the post-colonials. The nervous semi-detachment from the old world’s cultural and political authority and the unsettled practical value of the war due to all kinds of border chicanery in the still socially volatile post-war valence of setting intersperse the story in the fumbling figure of naïve Ichabod haunted by the furious ghost of a fallen soldier from the war. The legend of Sleepy Hollow is Irving’s superb storytelling of the birth of a new culture begotten from its old motherland at its infant stage of building a national character afresh with its own cultural capital, such as folklore endemic to the new land of hope that Irving so cherished.

    The good teacher Ichabod Crane

    Flees from the Headless Horseman

    With all his gentle might in vain

    For the ghost rider outruns the man.

    Now the riders roam in the shadow

    Looking for recruits in Sleepy Hollow.

    P.S. This short essay on Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is my contribution to a weekly Twitter event whose theme for this week is ‘The Headless Horsemen”, which seems to prevalently existent throughout the cultures of our global village. What uncanny synchronicity is to come upon this subject matter since I am currently reading Irving’s eponymous book that also contains many other stories from his wonderful ‘Sketch Book’.