P.S: It’s Fairy-tale Tuesday on Twitter, and this is my poesy contribution to the weekly fairy twitter feast for those of you who take a fancy to fanciful elements and dwell in the beauty of the mysterious nature.
Tag: Writing
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the secret of the sea
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.
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The Heroic Age Revisited: ‘The Tale of Troy’, by Roger Lancelyn Green – review
The Tale of Troy by Roger Lancelyn GreenMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
History is a branch of literature woven by artists and artificers with stories full of events, places, and people embroidered on the latticework of time, which mirrors the invariable pith of humanity to posterity. In truth, history is a literary creation of reality in the habiliment of artistic imagination, which we call mythology. In this regard, The Tale of Troy by Roger Lancelyn Green is a refreshingly cracking retelling of historical Trojan War knitted together with mythological strands as though to be seen from a magical casement to the misty antiquity, which Herodotus defines as the Heroic Age of the Five Ages of Man (which, by the way, Ovid interestingly omitted in his Roman version of the Ages of Men) when divine immortals responded to your pleas directly and promptly and freely made love with their beautiful mortal subjects with unquelled divine lust.
Drawn on a compendium of classical narratives of ancient writers, principally Homer’s Iliad, Green retells the beginning and end of Trojan War, reprises the scenes of the heroic characters and capricious Immortals, and remasters the thematic theater of dramas collapsing a great divide of time and space with his genius story-telling skills as an erudite but affable raconteur. Green takes you to the wedding banquet of Menelaus and Helen in Sparta where the goddess of discord Eris first presented an apple of discord, to Paris of Troy happily living with Oenone, a mountain nymph, on Mount Ida, to the Greek Camp outside the Wall of Troy where Agamemnon and Achilles were having a row over their beautiful Trojan female captives, and to Odysseus’s 10-year journey back home in Ithaca. The tale of Troy regenerates more stories about the fates of the characters following the end of the epic war, which leads to the dawn of the Iron Age, the Age of Man, in which we live. The Tale of Troy is a literary equivalent of Matryoshka, a frame story that presents manifold stories that delight you with pleasant surprises.
The great Roman poet Horace once said it’s harder to treat a story in your own way. In fact, to retell a story is harder than to create one from void because it requires a special ability with the aid of natural wit to make the original source texts adapt to the contemporary readership of the time the author belongs to. To that effect, this book is a magical casement of the misty past told by a Homeric storyteller of our modern time who will take you to where the ancient ocean sends forth the breeze of the shrill Aegean Sea to let you sail an imaginary voyage with the Greek Kings and the Trojan refugees, while the Olympian gods are watching you from Mount Olympus.
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vertigo of words
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.
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gentle giant
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.
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