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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
All Saints Day
into the cerulean blue
we yield our breath
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
All Saints' Day
a nit-picker picks away
at my seems
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
All Souls Day
another year's build-up
of absences
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
cracking their cheeks
winds whip up hurricanes
through Lear's wits
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
through the slap-slap
of windscreen wipers
spring rain
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
morning mist
the breath of another
seems to appear
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
amateur hour
while a poet writes
the pine sighs
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
In my earlier days a latent tuberculosis infection sought to wrest that from me with far less success than later episodes of laryngospasm and more recently asthma.
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
just like that
your miracle of being
made no more.
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
All the Days of the Dead and Dying
At seven, as the firstborn child of a physically and socially isolated post-war family in rural New Zealand, I cradled nightly the overarching vastness of the stars to bed with me; a stone I clung to through the infinity of space and time that stretched between wakefulness and sleep.
Filled with the universe, I would await sleep by trying to image the silence of total absence before the universe gained an existing presence. Nothing - no space, no time, no light, the total absence of everything - strained to take conceptual form within my childhood brain. Absence of light was easy but then I battered my mind against an easily imaged darkness but without form. Was it cubic, conical or spherical? Space requires boundaries. Can nothing be contained? But to be contained within one of these necessitated form and surely the void has no form and thus cannot change.
For hours I would lie in no-sleep trying to come to terms with an infinite sphere with no centre and no circumference until my being slipped into that place which was no-place.
Many years later I would read Jorge Luis Borges' essay "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal" in which the author explored the possibility "that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors." Giordano Bruno, for instance, would come to state exultantly in 1584 "We can assert with certitude that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere". Borges then suggested that Pascal would darken this image with the words "Nature is a fearful sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."
Stephen Hawking later misrepresented that Pope John Paul II had said to him “It’s OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not inquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment of creation and the work of God.”
Valuing the omnipotent reach of physics and mathematics, Hawking and associates have continued to explore the applicability of quantum theory to the instant before time and space came into being at the big bang. (I continue to struggle with the idea that the beginning can have a "before".) They came up with a model of the big bang according to the theory of general relativity that was developed to take into account quantum effects which they called the No Boundary Proposal.
The words the Pope actually addressed to Hawking were "Any scientific hypothesis on the origin of the world, such as the hypothesis of a primitive atom from which derived the whole of the physical universe, leaves open the problem concerning the universe’s beginning. Science cannot of itself solve this question: there is needed that human knowledge that rises above physics and astrophysics and which is called metaphysics; there is needed above all the knowledge that comes from God’s revelation."
with one last breath
nothing slips out of
the universe
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
free world through the fog of militant benevolence
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- Category: November 2017
spring draws to an end
the touch
her hands in mine
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
murmuring shells
when prophecy breaks down
into static
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
tongues of fire
lick me back to when
i was without
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
a match struck
against the darkness —
dawn awakening
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
of end times the hearth flicker in earthen hearts
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
the poet
the poet dwells
at a safe distance
from words
the poet
pussyfoots around
the utter brink
the poet paces out
the sound of space
in-waiting
the poet
hot off the press
goes silent
the poet goes
dum-de-dum-de-dum
between breaths
the poet
pads out
the silences
the poet
lipsynchs his reflection
in tranquility
the poet
skirts the edges
of relevance
the poet
rattles off
his mortal coil
the poet at home
with the loneliness
of a long-distance runner
the poet
scratches the imagined limits
of his horizons
the poet
feathers
his nest egg
the poet
measures his success
in tossed panties
the poet loses
his daytime job
to the moon
the poet quickens
to the sound
of his own voice
the poet
strikes a pose
off its pedestal
the poet
plays out
the party line
the poet weeps
as sound and sense end
his abstinence
the poet
resurrects
a moment
the poet
loses himself
in his words
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
evening sun
the cosmos carries a torch
for her footfall
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
That Than Which
Without the creation of a word to name it in the late sixteenth century, did the doctrine or belief that there is no God have existence? What prompted the active rejection of God leading to the refusal to believe in that than which no greater can be conceived let alone have the ability to even conceive of a being greater than oneself at all? Was it the hubris of an impatient heir on the brink of committing parricide?
Some three hundred years after the word was created Friedrich Nietzche proclaimed "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
A self-avowed atheist, did Nietzche mean that there was once a God who had actually died, or rather that the collective idea of one had? Following the so-named Enlightenment, the idea of a universe entirely subject to laws of physics instead of divine providence was now reality. Philosophical discourse had shown that governments did not need to be based around the idea of divine right to be legitimate, but rather formed by the rational consent of the governed — that it was possible to develop a full-scale and consistent human morality without reference to God. It seemed that the human adventure no longer needed God as the source for all morality, value, or order in the universe; philosophy and science now seemed capable of doing that for us.
Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design states "M-Theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. .... Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
Are we the words we make flesh from?
my shadow follows
the sun to the edge
of the earth
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- Written by Hansha Teki
- Category: November 2017
moon in the clouds
my best poker face
lost in translation