The Gift
She paces
By his side
On a quiet street,
Leafy and wide.
The evening air is balmy
And a golden half moon
Of August
Hangs high
In the sky.
"How beautiful is the Moon",
She says,
"Brighter than in June.
"A pity it is not full tonight".
"You know",
He tells her smiling,
"This thing may sound
Really puzzling,
But,
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Cesarean Section
On a sunny day of Taurus
they cut her abdomen.
With stainless scalpels
the surgeons unlatched her uterus
and out of her slashed womb,
touching with their sterile gloves
the enigma of an enclosed but remote self,
they pulled out the boy crying,
covered with blood,
incised forever
with the trauma of a violent birth,
a ferocious portal to light,
a brutal entrance into the world
through the skillful horror
of a Caesarean section.
Many days passed since then
and they have grown wild,
like cranberries and black currants,
sprouting from an invisible umbilical cord
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poem by Paul Hartal
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A Song of Infinity
Once on a Monday afternoon
Infinity extended
Its infinitesimal arms
Into countless dimensions
And at seven o'clock P.M.
It began to sing
a sincere silent song.
And then,
Its invisible hands reached
Beyond the unfathomable.
Infinity timelessly traversed
The boundless vastness
In myriad directions.
Suspended in imagination,
It walked through
Limitless corridors
Of complex labyrinths,
Celebrating the silky triumph
Of innumerability.
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poem by Paul Hartal
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For Paul Celan
The stars of eternity stare into the darkness
Breathing nothingness that grows around
Orphaned black holes of silent despair in space
Your percolated wounds never could heal
By the doleful symphonies of a tormented élan.
You never recovered from the mass murders
To which you bear witness with anguished cenotaphs
Oh your yellow haired mother could not come home
She could not come home; her heart was torn by lead.
Blazing stars of frozen eternity shine at the moon frost
Slowly the late autumn opens an envelope of pain
It engulfs your lost world with charred pilgrims
Floating along latitudes of convulsive memories.
Your yellow haired mother could not come home
Her heart was torn by lead; she could not come home
Hot stars of cold eternity gleam in the lonely darkness
And black holes dance in the crumbling empty space
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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Girl from Sri Lanka
I have no idea
Whether she is Tamil or Sinhalese.
The girl with her neatly combed hair
And native dress
Is a newcomer from Sri Lanka
Who landed in Montreal
Shortly before the devastating tsunami waves
Of 2004 crashed ashore
On her island country.
She greets me with a friendly "Hello"
And her lovely smile
Fills the store space
With innocent charm and grace.
"Keep on smiling", I tell her
Before I leave
And she acknowledges the encouragement
With an acquiescent expression on her face.
I seldom see the same warm smile here
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Farewell of a Cottonwood
Almost for a century
A majestic cottonwood tree,
Lonely and salutary,
Waved its leafy branches to the sky,
Adorning the corner where
St. Catherine Street
And Lansdowne Avenue meet
In Montreal.
This giant old poplar of the city
Survived urban growth
And the spread of factories.
It towered to soothe, not to seethe,
Truly a magnificent poem in chlorophyll
Which helped the people of Westmount
To breathe.
Yet the tree had been assaulted
By the stress of pollution
By severe ice storms and draughts,
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poem by Paul Hartal
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From Plane to Sphere
They all tried.
They tried to free Euclid of every flaw.
At Bach’s time Girolamo Saccheri did
And Adrien-Marie Legendre later.
Unconsoled,
Pitying himself and all mankind,
Farkas Bolyai came back
With broken mast and torn sail.
He came back from the voyage
To the reefs of the infernal Dead Sea.
He traversed the bottomless night,
Devoting his life to the search for truth,
Trying to prove Euclid’s fifth postulate
And reach the parallels.
At the beginning he warned his son
But later he encouraged, even urged him
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poem by Paul Hartal
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Meaning and Eternity
Don’t tell me
This life is without focus and logic
Don’t tell me
This life is elsewhere
Immersed in uncertainty of destination
Rocking back and forth on cosmic trails.
Don’t tell me
That love is not eternal
And the end of life is death.
How can I agree with you?
The substance of the psyche is unknown.
Brain, cognition and matter
Remain a more profound conundrum
Than the riddle of the sphinx.
And is not the conjecture
That there exist forms
Of indubitable knowledge
Just a logical error, a misconception?
Is it not that somewhere reality
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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Moon Remembers the Astronauts
Neil Armstrong arrived first,
Landing the lunar module of Apollo 11
At the Sea of Tranquility
On July 19,1969.
“That’s one small step for man,
One giant leap for mankind”,
He said,
And Edwin Aldrin stood next to him.
Later others came.
In all a dozen men walked on the moon
Perturbing her pristine lot with rhythmic dockings.
Conrad, Bean and Mitchell,
Scott, Irwin, Young and Duke were there,
Strolling in moon dust, before Schmitt and Cernan
From the crew of Apollo 17
Touched down in the Taurus-Littrow valley
On a December day of 1972.
But since then human foot did not step on the moon
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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Ghost Machine
Wittgenstein took a sip from his tea.
"You're wrong Descartes, I can tell you,
because body and mind are one".
"Wittgenstein is right", seconded Ryle.
He looked very angry
and shook his head as he continued:
"In claiming that your thoughts are separated
from your body you created a dogma
of the ghost in the machine."
"Gentlemen", Descartes said, "relax.
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poem by Paul Hartal
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