Poetic Literature

Literary Poetic

The Four Quartets

Love After Love

Homecoming

Dandelion

The Infinite

Song of the Open Road

Song of the New Earth

The rose is without 'why'

Ode to Freedom

Why Beauty Matters?

Halevai (If Only I Wish)

The World of Yesterday

the Soundless Sound

The Educated Imagination

The Birds of Heaven

Akasha

Friendship

Animus/Anima

The Age of Aquarius

Internal Necessity

Known Unknown

Stepping Stone

End of Power

The Examined Life

Les elemens- Chaos

Trust in the Uncertain

Prosperity

Narayana

Divine Mother

Gratitude

Polyphony

Science & Metaphysics

Kasab

Reality and Justice

Asha

Musing

Cieloytierra

k'atun

A Blessed Unrest

Om Bhur Buvaha Suvaha

Anthropomorphism

Core Philosophy

Anthology

Dialouge

Maxim

Aphorism

Remembrance

Conversation

Opus

Serendipity

Gymnopedies

Man & Measure

Nafas

Eureka

Atman

Forgiveness of the Past

The New Life

Harmony

Evolutionary Remembering

Unfolding

Landscape of Beauty

Numinous

Koan

Istiqbal

SatNam

Deracinate

Atlantis

In my craft or sullen art

Kalachakra

The Overview Effect

Abundant Recompense

Kindled words

Passion

The poet (Mehdi Akhavan Sales) seems a bit angry and may be sad or disappointed. He is talking to Ghasedak (Dandelion) who is believed to be a messenger, especially the one who gives us good news. But, apparently, he is not in good mood now and begins talking to Ghasedak rather unfriendly with complains. He says, ” you have come and maybe with good news. But you are wasting your time by turning around my house. I am waiting for no news, from nobody. Go to those who are waiting for you. In my heart, everything and everybody is blind and deaf. Leave me alone. I am the one who is stranger in his own homeland. Something from within my heart is telling me that you are untrue, you are deceit.” But suddenly, he changes his mind (probably Ghasedak is going away!) and says, ” Are you really going? But where? Where are you going? By the way, do you have any news from anywhere? Is there any warm ash somewhere? I don’t expect fire, is there still a very small sparkle in any fire place?” At the end, he seems sad and disappointed again. But this time, he seems talking to himself. He ends his words by saying, ” Ghasedak! The clouds of the entire world are crying in me night and day.”

Ghasedak (Dandelion) by Iranian poet Mehdi Akhavan Sales
What is it that makes us human? Driven by these questions, filmmaker and artist Yann Arthus-Bertrand working with a team of translators, journalists and cameramen, captured deeply personal and emotional accounts of real-life stories on topics that unite us all; struggles with poverty, war, homophobia, and the future of our planet mixed with moments of love and happiness. Through these stories, HUMAN brings us face to face with the Other, making us reflect on our lives. From stories of everyday experiences to accounts of the most unbelievable lives, these poignant encounters share a rare sincerity and underline who we are – our darker side, but also what is most noble in us, and what is universal.
As an universal language, music transcends our emotions, sublimates the pictures and rhythmises the story. Armand Amar’s compositions magnifies the voices
and the richness of HUMAN’s purpose to create a musical landscape of a moving eclecticism.

Poem Of The Atoms by Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī
Poem Of The Atoms by Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī

O' day, arise!
shine your light , the atoms are dancing
Thanks to Him the universe is dancing,
overcome with ecstasy , free from body and mind
I'll whisper in your ear where their dance is leading them.
All the atoms in the air and in the desert are dancing ,
puzzled and drunken to the ray of light,
they seem insane.
All these atoms are not so different than we are,
happy or miserable,
perplexed and bewildered
We are all beings in the ray of LIGHT from The Beloved,
nothing can be said.

An Interview with Nacer Khemir director of the film Bab'Aziz - The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul:

A visual poem of incomparable beauty, Bab'Aziz begins with the story of a blind dervish named BabâAziz and his spirited granddaughter, Ishtar. Together they wander the desert in search of a great reunion of dervishes. With faith as their only guide, the two encounter other travelers with stories of their own. Filled with breathtaking images and wonderful music, Nacir Khemir has created a fairytale-like story of longing and belonging.

Bab'Aziz - The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul
Leda and the Swan by William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats interests in the supernatural were always an important element in his poetic inspiration, in particular in his approach to symbolism. For him symbols were more than a poetic tool, tapping into a vast reservoir of collective experience, which he termed at various stages the Great Memory, Anima Mundi (the World Soul), and the Record, none of which is, however, quite the same as the other. Yeats’s devotion to mysticism led to the development of a unique spiritual and philosophical system that emphasized the role of fate and historical determinism, or the belief that events have been preordained, particularly in descriptions of situations of human and divine interaction. By using images of chaos, disorder, and war, Yeats engaged in an understated commentary on the political situations of his day where a sense of cultural crisis and conflict seeps through his poems.

In “Leda and the Swan,” Yeats rewrites the Greek myth of Zeus and Leda to comment on fate and historical inevitability: Zeus disguises himself as a swan to rape the unsuspecting Leda. In this poem, the bird is fearsome and destructive, and it possesses a divine power that violates Leda and initiates the dire consequences of war and devastation depicted in the final lines. By rendering a well-known poetic symbol as violent and terrifying rather than idealized and beautiful, Yeats manipulates poetic conventions, an act of literary modernism, and adds to the power of the poem.

Salman Rushdie: "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights"
Inspired by the traditional “wonder tales” of the East, Rushdie’s novel is about the age-old conflicts that remain in today’s world, a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.

The central character of Rushdie’s new novel, is a Bombay-born gardener, now lonely and aging, living in an unfamiliar city New York. This isn’t the wish fulfillment of a flying dream; it threatens his livelihood and brings the increasing hostility of strangers. “Why do you imagine I consider my condition an improvement? he wanted to cry out. Why, when it has ­ruined my life and I fear it may bring about my early death?”. He is doubly uprooted, separated both from the earth itself and the Indian birthplace that he loved. “He wished he had never become detached from the place he was born, wished his feet had remained planted on that beloved ground, wished he could have been happy all his life in those childhood streets, and grown into an old man there and known every paving stone, every betel-nut vendor’s story, every boy selling pirated novels at traffic lights.”

Contemporary sophistication declares that peace is boring, moderation is blah, happy is sappy. Defying sophistry, Rushdie imagines a contented people, but only by depriving them of dreams. No visions, no nightmares. Their sleep is empty darkness. The implication is that our human gift of imagining can’t exist without the hatred, anger and aggressiveness that lead to such human behaviours as warfare, conscious cruelty and deliberate destruction. To imply that only our dark jinn inside can give us dreams and visions may be one way of admitting the essential balance between the creative and the destructive within us.

Salman Rushdie: "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights"
Franz Liszt - Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (Poetic and Religious Harmonies), S 173

Funérailles (the 7th piece) is composed of four distinct sections, with three main themes repeating throughout. The first section, labeled "Introduzione," is a dark and gloomy adagio movement whose opening bars represent the sound of muffled bells from across a dreary battlefield. Its forlorn right-hand chords are offset by thundering, sforzando left-hand tremolos, which are interrupted and calmed into submission by the sudden call of battle trumpets, leading into the piece's next theme. In its second section, the piece presents a somber F-minor funeral march that modulates into a stunning lagrimoso A♭-major melody, relying heavily on augmented fifths to convey what can be viewed as a sort of dismal sense of hope. The piece then leads into a heroic, powerful warrior march, whose valiant and triumphant chords are backed by powerful cascades of ostinato octaves in the bass. This theme builds in intensity until it reaches a fortissimo peak, at which point it breaks suddenly into its conclusion. It is in this conclusion that Liszt reintroduces each theme from the piece, beginning with the funeral march theme, this time more powerful and emphatic. He then briefly reiterates parts of the A♭-major theme before bringing back the left-hand octave-driven warrior march. However, rather than allowing this theme's intensity to take control again, he limits its duration and ends the piece with a sudden drop into quiet, open staccatissimo chords.

Franz Liszt - Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (Poetic and Religious Harmonies), S 173
Franz Schubert - Winterreise, D. 911
Franz Schubert - Winterreise, D. 911
Winterreise (Winter Journey) is a song cycle for voice and piano, a setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller, which tracks the winter journey of a jilted lover wandering into the snow finding ever-greater depths of alienation. Through a series of recurrent images, the poet weaves a complex tapestry of images from his tragic feelings of desperation. Among these images are those of ice, snow, death, tears, anguish and journeying. Much of the organic unity of the cycle is achieved by the poet’s employment of these recurrent images. Although the cycle tells of the pains of unrequited love, Schubert’s protagonist is not the victim of an individual set of circumstances; he is, rather, a romantic hero set against fate itself. Gute Nacht, the opening song, is emblematic of the entire cycle. The opening phrase, ‘A stranger I came, a stranger I depart’, indeed even the first word ‘Fremd’ (strange, foreign), set at the apex of the opening motif, prepares us for the extraordinary journey which is to follow. Feelings of remorse and rejection are trumped by thoughts of death early in the cycle, in Der Lindenbaum, and again in Irrlicht, when the dejected lover flirts with feux follets, and these thoughts grow pervasive; four of the last five songs make it their subject.

Ali Azimi - Pishdaramad
Ali Azimi - Pishdaramad
My troubles aren't due to misfotune, nor sadness,
Nor is it because my clothes or shelter are lacking,
Neither due to lack of electricity, water or bread,
It is the loss of solitude's charm
I hope one day this ordeal is resolved.
Wish I could become wind so to play with your hair,
Or become words entering your ears,
Become an idea so to gain access to your thoughts,
Or become a Benz under your feet,
Become money in your pockets for you to carry,
Or become dust so to enter your lungs.
I know, you have a myriad of admirers in queue,
They all love and highly think of you,
And that warm persona of yours!
I come at times close just to become distant and stray,
I may end up dead if this continues, I fear
I wish to become a current and his your gaze,
Become a tear just to touch and roll down your face,
Or a ringlet - touching your slender shoulders,
Or wind and play with your hair,
A cigar so to touch your lips,
Or become its smoke so to be absorbed in your lungs,
O fortune! Come to my rescue as my restplace is cold with her absence


Brad Mehldau solo piano version of Radiohead's "Exit Music (For A Film),"
Aida Shahghasemi - Beman (Stay)
Kiana Hayeri - “hidden side of life in the Middle East”
Kiana Hayeri, an Iranian-born photographer on the “hidden side of life in the Middle East”

Kiana (b.1988) grew up in Tehran and moved to Toronto while she was still a teenager. Faced with the challenges of adapting to a new environment, she took up photography as a way of bridging the gap in language and culture. After an incident in her personal life, while still in university, she packed her life in a backpack and started a nomad life to search for a place that could be called home. She has worked internationally but remained focus on stories that illuminates her background. Her self-initiated and self-funded projects often explore complex topics such as migration, adolescence and sexuality. She is currently working on a long-term project documenting the lives of youth and their culture societies deal with conflict and war.


Ian Brown, author of "Sixty: The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?"
"How much life can you live in the fourth quarter, not knowing when the game might end?"

“What will I remember as I die?” For most of us the answer is, of course, nothing; we can’t remember much, even now. But this is the existential question that drives Ian Brown to keep a diary as he hits the Big 6-0. Suddenly panicked by the idea of time running out, he figures he had better starting paying better attention: “If you take the trouble to write down the details,” he writes, “you get a second chance to live it.”

Ian Brown, author of "Sixty: The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?"

Richard Rhodes, Outgoing Canadian Art editor reflects on community in arts:

I came to the job respecting a magazine that could bridge the art world with an audience who wanted to learn about art and artists and come to an inside appreciation of the people who shape their lives around the making and looking and caring about art...Editing Canadian Art has given me an unending engaged overview of these issues and more. It has brought me close to writers and artists and curators and dealers who start their days looking at what is emerging on the horizons of where life and art meet culture. These are people with great belief in the sense that we can make of the visible world..

Richard Rhodes, Outgoing Canadian Art Editor Reflection