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

Tag: Writing

  • shadow love

     

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    Rouged and primmed

    A plain old maid,

    in sunshine and shadow

    Had traveled long

    Humming a song

    In search of her beau.

     

    But she grew old,

    She’s growing older

    And a terror of shadow

    speared as she saw

    nothing but a shadow

    of her elusive beau.

     

    And, as her crushed hopes

    Collapsed her forged hopes.

    She closed her eyes and ears

    To let go of her false hopes

    Of chasing the cruel shadow

    Of her haughty elusive beau.

     

    Her old, plain, tired shadow

    Cast upon the last sunlight

    Of the twilight in the sunset

    Rested in the breezy meadow

    And watched the hazy shadow

    of the sunset looking like her beau.

  • malibu drive

     

    The sun’s bright, the sky bluest,

    The air sweet, the breeze mildest, 

    The choir of nature gaily caroling

    The wonder of the world it bears.

     

     

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    Addendum – Today in History

    • 245 years ago today, the American Revolutionary War began with the battles of Lexington and Concord.
    • 77 years ago today, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the abandonment of the Gold Standard and ordered the confiscation of privately owned gold coins.
    • 69 years ago today, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, relieved of his Far East command by President Harry Truman, bade farewell in an address to Congress with a quotation from a ballad: “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”

  • over and over

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    She kept all her love to herself alone, all alone,

    But let her concealment, like a pearl in the clam,

    Feed on her rosy cheek: she pined in thought,

    And with a blue and even bluer melancholy,

    She stood there like Dido by the River of Lethe,

    Smiling gently at the last shadow of memory.

     

    P.S.: A new life can mean anything, which spawns multiple kinds of rebirth in any kind: Born-again Christians believe that their newly professed baptismal promise will gain them new strength in life through conversion to God. Reformed characters want to right the ship derelict in the maelstrom of life. In this regard, I think lonely hearts hardened by the absence of love should deserve a new life filled with the pleasure of love in the same way the heartbroken Psyche descended upon the Hades and found her lost love, Eros. It’s about the soul redeeming through love. This is my kind of New Life, the Supreme One of Life, which sets a confined soul, such as the narrator of my poem, free from unjust and cruel incarceration in an existential drudgery. 

  • Thousand loves

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    Her love that has been, it is that which shall be;

    and there is no one love but a thousand loves:

    A gentleman and a foreman, a mister and a master,

    A soldier and a sailor, a wrangler and a rancher,

    A fighter and a keeper, a preacher and a paramour,

    A singer and an actor, a drifter and a deceiver –

    A Shapeshifter with a thousand faces of a lover

    changing and changing, round and round, forever

    all but his heart true blue to his mistress, dear.

     

    P.S.: This is my a priori adaptation of Shakespeare’s idea of the perfect better half or lover in “All’s Well That Ends Well”. She sees different aspects of her sweetness dear whose various characteristics promise her fresh delights and never bore her. 

     

  • they come to her at night

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    The night was a strange paradox of light and dark. It was too dark to invoke images of the bright beautiful things. It was too light to provoke imaginations of the blissful obliviousness. The night was a white heat of the sleepless senses that kept taking in all seen and heard even after the provocateurs were long gone out of sight. This was maddening and becoming madder and striking the notes of all madness. Iris couldn’t sleep as the night was getting deeper and darker, and it was consuming every part of her in a great white incandescent flame like a funeral pyre that once engulfed Dido’s forsaken body and unfortunate heart. The senses that kept her awake besieged her glass castle without mercy and started to screen the scenes of sadness and more sadness as an apparition of the past narrated the story buried in its tomb without an epitaph. She was wide awake at the bewitching hour, and she was helplessly defenseless against the force of the hour.

    Since she was a little girl, Iris has been going through the same nocturnal rituals of waking up at 3:00 AM on time, precisely, continuously, as always. Every single night was every single rite of this uncanny performance of sleeplessness – that is, exactly at 3:00 AM. When she wakes up, the electronic digits always show 3:00 AM with glows that seems to grow lighter the more she looks at it in fearful awe. Fearful because Iris has learned that it is the hour when the gates of the underworld, the netherworld, the world beyond are open, and the regions of faeries and wandering spirits roam the earth as witches fly to the devil’s banquets. Hokum it may be, but the bewitching hour also seems to include Iris as a coterie of the supernatural for what’s worth. This secret is hers and hers only in fear of being branded as a weirdo or a witch’s apprentice even. Yet, because Iris’s soft heart cannot bear a secret too long for its painfully tender fullness of emotions and feelings to keep it to herself, it now agonizes her sense and antagonizes her sensibility. And it was this night that got her to a paroxysm of inquisitiveness, inadmissibility, and ineffableness, enveloped in the mysterious veil of incredibility so enigmatically eerie that it almost felt infatuating with the unknown.

    The magical hour was now in possession of the waken Iris with wide eyes, and the effect was smeared into every part of her body without a miss like ink instantly and ferociously diffusing in a glass of clear water. She did not like it, but her opinion was useless under the power of the supernatural hour. Iris wanted to break the spell and doing so would require her of facing another unknown mysterious force. Her Catholicism would defy her magical assumption on the incredible symptom, but Iris knew that her religion itself entailed the magical qualities of belief and that it was only natural for her to connect the dots between the two belief systems as a solution to her ghostly malady. That’s it. She can’t take it anymore, she can’t have it any longer. Forget the religion, and think primal. Iris has made up her mind to start her investigation of the supernatural phenomenon that she has been going through to find whys and wherefores.

  • poesie – i dream myself alive

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    Awake I know I dream not

    As the sense still alive

    Tells what is seen is not

    A fancy but a reality alive

    Of the wonder of the mind

    Working wonders of creation

    Of a fiction of the mind

    In a mind’s reservoir. 

     

    Awake I think when I dream

    As the pulses of sense weaken

    And the images seen past seem

    All but phantasmal panorama seen

    In a mind’s theater of illusion – 

    Fantastic beasts, wailing ghosts

    Enveloped in the cloud of dreams

    Lurking in the stupor of the sense. 

     

    Awake, awake, awake I become

    When the sense divorces fancies

    As the mind calls dreams hokum

    And claims a seat of imaginations

    Till it clears the clouds of ignorance

    Darkening the light of the mind wondrous

    Of creating the reality of its sovereign own

    With no assistance of chants and spells. 

     

    P.S.: Thomas Hobble (1588-1679), an English scientist and philosopher, excoriates in his essay “You and Your Dreams” the knavery of sham magicians and magical folk claiming to deal with supernatural beings to induce naive people to believe in superstitions and the power of magic for the promotion of their trades. Hobble enlightens readers that superstitions arise out of the ignorance of distinguishing imaginations, a second-hand reality, from dreams, a detritus of agitated part of the mind. The gist of his argument is that ghosts and haunted places ensue from an intractable combination of the images of the seen and the second-hand images that become distorted imaginations made look real.  In sum, Hobble’s theory of dream interpretation corresponds to the postmortem dream theories of Carl Jung. Hence this poem is my understanding of Hobble’s essay on the aforesaid subject.