poetry • Other Shorts
Small poems, serious and humorous, on the nature of Everything.
Borrowed forms, invented forms, more forms, and no forms; any sort of of short expression.
It does not matter why I love
It does not matter why I love.
I love! I l love!
I dream of flights above!
I dream of whooping and of wallowing,
of leading and of following,
of life long loved and love long lived.
It does not matter why I love.
I love! I love!
~ Amoran yCahil ~
A very early work by this venerable poet of Oraea’s past, perhaps the first of his to be recorded or referenced by others in their own.
It was written while in a state of active but confusing love and verifiably composed for a very real someone. Many a musician has made a song of this piece, something Amoran was known to love. He believed everyone should share in all work, and was always curious what a particular musician's state of being would bring to their version, what angle their heart of that moment might amplify.
Joy, longing, yearning, hoping, a sense of making it second by second while they figure out how to cope… all interpretations sang true to him, for he knew well what it was to love widely and wildly and could not deny that there is something of everything in every something.
Its words can still be heard regularly in several tea houses over certain brews around abstract times of night, especially when a light rain begins to fall but the sky seems clear and the soil smells fresh and your close friends are near.
"Would that I knew you!"
On the pocketed plains of Oraea’s petrified forests.
the Robot gazed up at the bleached ascendant spire
shaped of wood that would not burn in fire.
“Would that I knew you in an instant.
Casually as breath.
As awakening.
Noticing.
Being.
Would that I knew you!”
~ anonymous ancient poem ~
found in a Xeonexai caldera on the planet Oraea by Hjenlyera Xet
while running an excavation expedition there;
unclear if it is only about a Robot or composed by one as well.
the cost of the lost
"The cost. The cost!
Yet an unknown price must and will suffice.
Every step of history shared, every rare soul and body bared,
every echo echo echo of voices, choices, noises gone gone gone,
every shadow of the lines of lives drawn from dark unto the dawn -
they're all one now under that same still-burning sun.
Nothing has path or power there - no being, no device.
For now, an unknown price must and will suffice.
But oh the loss! The lost!"
~ by Nickel Carnelian (legend-in-self-exile)
This poem can be found on the planet khoyyohk, at one of the many entrances to the ancient and ruined metropolis called almun-kho. Considering the more ‘baroque’ notes in this poem's energy and language, it is believed to be from earlier in Nickel's compositional career. It tells us that he has visited khoyyohk, yes, but it also reveals something of his character to know that he was moved enough to write both this and the other poems of his we've found there. The idea that he spent an unknown amount of time (as it were) on khoyyohk also means that certain ideas and realities about his life suddenly become possible, when we might never have considered them before…
These words were composed in response to the palpable presence of an absence left in an ancient cataclysm's wake. When that cataclysm came, a dispersed and diverse community of esoteric lineage was altogether lost, with all of their threads of deep history and vast mystery gone along with them. Everything that had pooled into their care, their awareness, their capacity to share - gone, gone, gone.