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

Tag: Poetry

  • 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. 

  • Feather of Two Truths

     

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    Osiris and the Sacred Scale, courtesy of National Geographic

    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. 

  • Wandering cloud

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    Water Lilies by Claude Monet

    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”. 

  • famous, ambitious

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    The incitement is fame to an honest mind, says Ben,

    The spur the clear spirit raises is fame, says John,

    I say the sap the adventurous keeps is fame anon.

     

    P.S.: While reading Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson: A Life, I came across the chapter regarding the eminent English playwright/poet Ben Jonson expressing his sentiment toward the premature death of young Prince Henry Frederick, son of King James I of England, whose earthly princely fame was soon writ in water. He said: “Fame is the incitement to honest minds,” which was later adapted by John Milton, author of Paradise Lost thus: “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit raises. The desire for fame is the last infirmity of noble minds.” So I, who is an amateur hobbyist writer/indie-blogger, reworked the wise old sayings of fame by these reverential titans of English Literature. I don’t think fame is necessarily evil, corrupting the heart of a soul. If used wisely, it works as a stimulant to strive for the fulfillment of your goals and dreams, so long as the ambition doesn’t grow into Rabelaisian proportion. 

     

  • wildflowers

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    I smile at the flowers,

    The earth whispers in the flowers,

    Heaven twinkles in the flowers,

    My heart leaps with pleasure

    And dances with the flowers.

    P.S.: Today I saw the flowers outside, and they filled me with the simplicity of sweetness that lifted my heart from a valley of tears in this world to a secret parterre in heaven. What lovely creatures they were!