Five Poems by Paul Sohar

 

The Peace of Kha

 

The air inside the temple can feed only the statues

and the granite walls of eternity

 

The fountains are used for cleansing off sins

and the stains of living, not for drinking

 

Only the dead and the unborn are allowed to enter

and those who learned to be without breathing,

without blinking, eating, drinking, and

passing the pain of life out of their bodies

 

The bodies that enter here speak in pictures

and marble gestures of praise and benediction

 

Every year twelve youths are allowed

to test their ability to be beyond mere existence

 

None of them ever fail to stay in there

totally still without breathing or evacuating,

their barely audible song of praise is

carried by the aeolian scents of a naked spring

 

And every year twelve pregnant virgins are

allowed in the temple as the brides of Kha

 

But the unborn do not sing of the future

which is now their past with time defeated

 

Being is the greatest good and the next best thing is

not having been born and not having to die,

and not having a body to soil the temple

and to be soiled by living

 

Being and not-being embrace in the temple

and their offspring is the Peace of Kha                                                     

 

            

In the Cathedral of the Night


There are nights when I can hear
what gargoyles sing

I can swallow what they
vomit into the street

I can see the things their eyes
shoot dead because

I am one of them in stone
or just in time-stopping stoniness
something I carry on my brows
placed there by dark hymns

I cannot sing but still
there are nights when

I can hear the sweet nothings
gargoyles sing
and I can lick the nectar they
spew forth because

I can kiss the carved-granite face
of the night just like them
and feel the solidity of heaven and
prayers etched by spires into the sky

 

 

Kergaradec: Litany of Breton Dolmens

A password between sheep and shepherds still

posted around a few traffic circles near land’s end

                    kergaradec

cries out to a self-involved sky

where even god stumbles with a map in hand

                   kergaradec

carries a whole quarry of weight

                   kergaradec

cracks the ground open with meaning

                   kergaradec

a cryptic history awakes to new dreams

                   kergaradec

a place you will never find unless it hits your car

                   kergaradec

feeds hand that hold other hand and can’t shake yours                  

       kergaradec

hard-boned and bone-cataracted

                   kergaradec

covers the stars the way it covers the past and the future

                   kergaradec

don’t come here if you seek anything

                   kergaradec

don’t die here if you find anything

                   kergaradec

take it away back where you come from

                   kergaradec

creates autumn out of shadows that conquer the sun

                   kergaradec

don’t try to demolish it because it will grow new cliffs

                   kergaradec

your password to the raindrops that will take you below

                   kergaradec

let it work on you and make you carry some of its weight

                   kergaradec

carves a megalith out of your first and last sigh

                   kergaradec

with slow steps behind you covers your tracks

                   kergaradec

will let you sleep under your sky-sized dolmen and there

                   kergaradec

will pass the word to you             

Candles in the Wind

it’s a silly race in which the winners

burn all the way down to a dirty

little puddle of wax with a hint

of the wick blackening the middle

 

a special prize goes to the ones

that burn at both ends turning into

pure light but most candles that

attempt the feat only turn into soot

 

yet now and then you see a candle that

defiantly throws its flame into the wind

before even halfway through and then

stands mute wrapped in its own darkness

 

but if you listen to its silence you’ll know

it’s never too late or too early to say no

to the flame that keeps on burning only

because someone lit the wick so long ago

 

 

THE OLTEC ALTAR

 

The fire stone is the most precious possession of an Oltec tribe;

on it they prepare their sacrificial meal, a ritual that goes

back to the time when an Oltec tribe found itself in a desert

of dry mudflats offering them neither food nor drink.

 

The chief prayed to the sun, begging it to take pity on them,

and the sun dropped a crumb of its own meal at the chief’s feet.

It was a hard stone, the size of a giant pumpkin,

and it still had hot flames shooting out of it.

 

The chief gathered the men of the tribe around this burning stone,

telling them they would cook a meal on that fire.

And since there was nothing else to cook,

they would put their hands in the flames to roast.

 

The men were hungry and so even more the ever willing to obey.

Their roasted hands made a nourishing meal that restored their strength

enough so that they could thank the sun for this gift.

After the prayer they fell asleep and slept for a whole week.

 

When they woke up they found their hands had grown back again.

But by that time the women and children too were faint from hunger,

and so the men prepared another meal in the same manner for them,

after which they all went to sleep for a whole month.

 

When they woke up the men were all dead,

but the women and children all regained their strength and they buried

the dead in a plot of dry land they used to farm when it was still good.

And then they were tired and slept for another month.

 

When they woke up they saw that a lush garden had grown out of the graves.

Trees laden with fruits, plants crowned with sweet flowers and luscious leaves.

The whole tribe sat down for a great feast around the burning stone that

had cooled off by then and was kept as a monument to the survival of the tribe.

 

Later every Oltec tribe carved out a similar fire stone of its own
and held a yearly ceremonial meal around it in memory of the dead.
In years of scarcity a child was also sacrificed on this altar in order to
propitiate the Sun, and meagre harvests sometimes still recur.

Paul Sohar washed up as a Hungarian student refugee on these shores where he got a degree in philosophy and a day job in a pharmaceutical lab; he has been writing and publishing in every genre, including seventeen volumes of translations, the latest being Pagan Flowers (French Symbolist Poets: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine, Iniquity Press, 2021). The latest of his own poetry: In Sun’s Shadow (Ragged Sky Press, 2020). Prose works: True Tales of a Fictitious Spy (Synergebooks, 2006, now with Iniquity Press) and a collection of one-act plays from One Act Depot (Saskatoon, Canada, 2014). 

Theater: wrote the lyrics for G-d Is Something Gorgeous (produced by Applause Theater in Scranton, PA, 2007). 

Magazines: Agni, Big Hammer, Gargoyle, Rattle, and hundreds of others. 

He has received three prizes in Hungary for his translation work, two Pushcart Prize nominations here in the US, and the First Prize from the Lincoln Poets Society for his own poetry.