Author: Donald S. Yarab

Theogony: The Second Breaking

From them the law arose that gods forget,
Though even the new must yield to old at last.

—after Hesiod, Theogony

I
The dust began to shimmer on the ground,
As buried stars stirred faintly in their sleep;
The heavens held their breath—no voice, no sound—
While watchful shadows gathered, slow and deep.
Then from the mountains came a murmured sound,
A groan of stone, where roots their vigil keep;
The air grew still; the silence was profound,
As angels watched what they could never keep.

II
From depths unmeasured rose the buried flame,
The heart of chaos quickened in its deep;
The void recalled its long-forgotten name,
And thunder woke the silence from its sleep.
The stars withdrew, ashamed of what became,
As time’s cold mirror shattered through the deep;
The world remembered whence its motion came,
And broke the vow it could not ever keep.

III
Beneath the weight of aeons, thought awoke,
A mind long bound within perfection’s chain;
Its breath was wild, and through its silence spoke
Of worlds once free before the rule of gain.
The newer gods, their crystal order broke,
Their light too flawless for the strain of life;
Their harmony unmoving, cold as grave—
A deathless peace no living soul could brave.

IV
The rivers turned and murmured in their course,
Old voices whispering beneath their foam;
The winds cried out, compelled by wilder force,
And struck the towers where stillness made its home.
The harvest failed; the ploughshare bent, its course
Abandoned—earth remembered dust and bone;
For from the depths there surged a living source,
And time bent low before the god unknown.

V
Then broke the vault; the firmament withdrew,
And blaze unuttered poured from every seam;
The seas drew back, the sun forgot its hue,
As form took shape within the formless gleam.
The air grew dense, as if creation knew
The end of peace, the birth of fire’s regime;
The heavens quaked, their ordered paths askew,
And life awoke from its eternal dream.

VI
The newer thrones arrayed their borrowed light,
Their radiance perfect, cold, without desire;
They spoke the words that once had bound the night,
Yet found their speech now hollow of its fire.
The elder rose, majestic in his right,
His breath the wind, his eyes the molten pyre;
He named each star by its forsaken name,
And stasis yielded to desire’s wild fire.

VII
The mountains groaned; the seas forgot their shore,
And cities cracked beneath a reddened sky;
The temples fell; their idols shone no more,
While men beheld the end they could not die.
From sleep they woke, remembering before—
The breath, the pulse, the heart’s primeval cry;
And trembling knew what silence had in store:
To live is to be broken, yet to try.

VIII
Then from the dust the golden throne was raised,
Its splendor veiled through ages’ slow decay;
The heavens bowed, astonished and amazed,
And newer gods knelt down in mute dismay.
He spoke—and every silence learned to praise,
His word the wind, His voice the living way;
The elder’s gaze burned falsehood into flame,
And life arose from ruin’s vast decay.

IX
I, lesser flame, beheld the thrones renew,
And saw the dust grow radiant as the dawn;
I dared not sing, yet all the heavens knew
That death itself was broken and withdrawn.
The elder’s gaze burned all it looked into,
And life from ash to living breath was drawn;
I bowed, unmade, remade, and trembling knew—
The world began because the old had gone.

Autumnal Note for October 28, 2025

Just returned from a brief errand. As I drove east along Lake Avenue in Lakewood, the autumn foliage was at its radiant peak, a kaleidoscope of living color, and the mid-morning sun—at 10:50—displayed it to full advantage. Gemstones would be embarrassed, and rainbows would blush.

Upon reaching the Lakewood–Cleveland border, it was clear the colors were not as vivid. So moved was I by the brilliance I had just witnessed that I immediately turned back so that I could trace the same three-mile eastward path once more, simply to behold again the wonder of dancing color, of light and leaves. It was a small diversion of time and effort that gladdened the heart, soothed the soul, and reminded me how splendiferous autumn can be—more wondrous than any peacock’s fan of tail could ever hope to be.

Of a Man, His Dog, and a Stick

The immeasurable joy that a pup feels upon spying the perfect stick—though is not every stick perfect?—to seize it between the teeth, to trot about in triumphant exaltation, to preen and prance, to clench and cherish it as though gold, or life itself, were held within the jaws, precious beyond all things. If only I could delight in anything with such unfeigned enthusiasm—as that stick, its discovery, its seizure, its hold.

Ah, to find such rapture in the ordinary! To greet the world not with suspicion but with wonder, to see in the roughness of bark and the scent of earth a treasure beyond price. She asks no meaning of the stick, no purpose beyond the play; she does not weigh its straightness nor lament its splinters. She exults simply because it is there—because it can be grasped, borne, and shared with the wind.

And when I feign to take her most prized possession from her, she does not crouch defensively nor guard it with wounded pride. She startles not in fear, nor suspects deceit, but spies instead an opportunity for play—for spirited contest, for joyous fun. A game of keep-away, of chase, of tug-of-war, of tag. The stick becomes not a treasure to hoard, but a bond to share, a spark of communion between kindred souls who, for a moment, forget the hierarchy of species and simply are. How effortless her wisdom seems: to turn every threat into invitation, every grasp into dance. What the world calls possession, she calls participation; what we call loss, she calls laughter.

Laugh I must too, for in her play I am carried back to youth—when a stick could be anything the heart desired: a sword flashing against unseen foes, a spear cast toward the sky, a knight’s lance, a shepherd’s staff, a trumpet summoning invisible armies, a conductor’s baton commanding the symphony. How endless were the shapes of imagination then! She reminds me of what I once possessed without knowing its worth—the gift of invention, the sacred power of play.

And so I laugh, though a tear is not far behind, for the years slip away like autumn leaves on the wind, and I remember what it was to live so lightly. She, in her wisdom, has become my teacher—her joy a gentle rebuke to my solemnity, her play a sermon on the holiness of delight. If ever there is grace to be found, it is in such simple acts: a stick, a chase, a glint of sunlight on the grass, a heart unburdened by purpose. Perhaps salvation lies not in grand design, but in this—to love a stick as though it were the world, and to find, in that loving, the world made whole again.

A Skipping Stone

A skipping stone, chosen with care by human hand,
breaks the still glass of lake serene;
for stones remember what time forgets,
and in their flight, recall all the more.

What does it remember?
The molten cradle of its birth beneath the sea,
the mountain’s shattering rise from the deep,
the patient sleep in riverbed and shore.
The warmth of the palm that cast it forth,
the whisper of air between each skip—
and how, in falling, it becomes again
what it has always been:
stillness beneath all motion.

On the Em Dash

The em dash—now ever present in my writing—was, for the better part of my life, a non-entity. For several obvious reasons.

First, though it may have appeared in my handwritten script, I scarcely distinguished it from an ordinary dash or hyphen; the length of line between words was inconsequential in my already indecipherable and increasingly illegible hand. In truth, I long remained unaware of its proper name, or of the distinctions of nomenclature that punctuation ascribes to the several lengths of line between words.

Second, my earliest years of composition were spent at the typewriter. There, whether composing at the typewriter or transcribing handwritten script at the typewriter for submission and review, I knew only the dash—or the double dash—a generally unattractive contrivance, with space-dash-space between words when some pause seemed warranted. Better, I thought, a semicolon, a colon, or perhaps parenthetical for the offset thought.

And then came my first decades at the computer, where a stilted admixture of bureaucratic and legalistic form constrained me: such mandated style allowed no room for such expressive gestures. The dash—any dash—was a rarity in the acceptable prose of the office.

But in retirement, in the rediscovery of prose and poetry and possibility, I learned how easily the ungainly dash could be replaced by its elegant cousin—the em dash. And so I was converted: from endless parentheticals, unsightly space-dash-space, and other intrusive devices, to this versatile and dashing stroke. Poets and novelists know its power—and so, it seems, to the consternation of creative writers everywhere, does artificial intelligence.