Tag: poetry

The Lingering Fire: Language Before, Within, and Beyond Speech

A Reflection Interwoven with Ante Verba, Verba, and Postverbum

Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Untitled 2005, acrylic on canvas
Cy Twombly (1928-2011), Untitled
2005, acrylic on canvas, 128 x 194½ in
“His madness is a circle of fire, an unbroken circuit of excess, each attempt at containment spilling into the next”—Art historian Malcolm Bull on the Bacchus paintings.

The three poems, CARMINA TRIA: DE VOCE AGGLUTIVA, which follow—Ante Verba, Verba, and Postverbum—did not emerge by design. They followed Liber Agglutivi as if by necessity. Once the treatise had been written, these poems had to be. They are not commentaries on the Liber, nor are they didactic restatements of its metaphysical claims. Rather, they are its echo—its ember. They are the hymns sung at the threshold that Liber Agglutivi only describes.

Even readers unfamiliar with the medieval-inspired treatise can enter these poems directly. They function as meditations on how language lives in us before we speak it, while we speak it, and after our words have fallen silent. Readers of the Liber will recognize these concerns, but the poems make them immediate and felt rather than theoretical.

They move through language as tremor, fire, and resonance. The sequence below mirrors the deeper structure of the Liber: from the agglutum primitivum (pre-verbal memory), to the verbum intransitivum (word as creation), to the postverbum and glosselitha (residual presence).

CARMINA TRIA: DE VOCE AGGLUTIVA

I. Ante Verba

Language as Tremor, Silence as Light

Ante Verba
(Versus ad limen vocis)
Verbum non dicitur, sed fit.
Non transit, sed regnat.
Nomen quod loquitur se ipsum
non oritur ex ore, sed ex ossibus.
Lingua non fert sensum,
sed tremorem.
Memoria quae nescit quid meminerit
audit quod non sonat.
Tacere est tangere lumen.
Loqui est amittere formam,
ut recipiatur flamma.

Before Words
(Verses at the threshold of voice)
The word is not spoken, but becomes.
It does not pass through, but reigns.
The name that speaks itself
arises not from the mouth, but from the bones.
Language carries not meaning,
but tremor.
Memory that knows not what it remembers
hears what does not sound.
To be silent is to touch light.
To speak is to lose form,
so that the flame may be received.

This poem inhabits the space where language has not yet been spoken but is already forming. It suggests that words do not begin with speech—they begin with the body, with memory, with a force older than conscious thought. In the Liber, this is called the agglutum primitivum—the murmur that speaks itself rather than being spoken.

The line “non oritur ex ore, sed ex ossibus” (“arises not from the mouth, but from the bones”) aligns with Martin Heidegger’s vision in Letter on Humanism, where language is not a tool but the “house of Being.” Maurice Blanchot, in The Writing of the Disaster, understands silence not as negation but as a paradoxical mode of presence—a vision we carry forward in our own line from Ante Verba: “Tacere est tangere lumen.”

The poem resists the tendency to think of silence as a void. It suggests instead that silence is already full—that the word is merely what breaks the threshold.

II. Verba

Language Does Not Carry Meaning—It Generates It

Verba
Non instrumenta, sed ignes.
Non indicia, sed invocationes.
Ex spiritu fiunt formae.
Ex sono fit lumen.
Verbum non portat sensum;
generat.
Non sequitur lucem;
effundit eam.
Obliti sumus verba sentire—
at illa nos sentiunt.

Words
Not instruments, but fires.
Not signs, but invocations.
From spirit, forms arise.
From sound, light is made.
The word does not carry meaning;
it generates it.
It does not follow light;
it pours it forth.
We have forgotten how to feel words—
but they feel us.

Verba shifts from anticipation to ignition. Here, the word becomes flame. It does not describe; it creates. This is the essence of the verbum intransitivum found in the Liber—a word that does not pass meaning from subject to object, but emits meaning by its very being.

This echoes Jacques Derrida’s insight in Of Grammatology: that language does not simply transmit ideas—it generates meaning anew with every utterance. Jean-Paul Sartre in What is Literature? treats language as an existential act, not a report, and this vision is mirrored in the line “Verbum non portat sensum; generat.”

The agglutivum, as the Liber defines it, is precisely this: a word that binds meaning not through grammar, but through presence. The poem closes with a reversal: it is not we who perceive words, but words that perceive us.

III. Postverbum

The Spectral Afterlife of Language

Postverbum
Verbum abit, sed tremor manet.
Non vox, sed vestigium vocis.
Non lumen, sed fulgor in ruina.
Post verbum non est silentium,
sed memoria quae loqui recusat.
Forma cecidit—
resonantia viget.
Non est oblivio,
nec repetitio.
Est remanentia
sine nomine.
Quod dictum est, abit.
Quod vivit, remanet.

After-Word
The word departs, but the tremor remains.
Not voice, but the trace of voice.
Not light, but gleam within ruin.
After the word there is not silence,
but memory that refuses to speak.
Form has fallen—
resonance thrives.
It is not forgetting,
nor repetition.
It is remainder
without name.
What has been spoken departs.
What lives remains.

What remains when the word falls away? Postverbum addresses the residue of speech, its spectral persistence. The Liber speaks of the glosselitha—words no longer active but still resonant. This poem inhabits that after-space: where meaning is not present, yet not gone.

Derrida’s trace (especially in Writing and Difference) hovers here: a remnant of presence that cannot be fully recovered, nor fully lost. Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, evokes this through the fragment—the broken form more alive than the whole. And Bachelard’s “intimate immensity,” in The Poetics of Space, seems apt: the vast echo of what once was word.

This is not nostalgia. It is presence beyond sound.

Coda: Language as Tremor, Fire, Trace

The poems above are not marginal to Liber Agglutivi—they are its liturgy. They enact what the treatise evokes: a philosophy of speech where the word is not a vessel but a lifeform.

If the Liber speaks of agglutive words—words that bind not by syntax but by resonance—then these poems are agglutive acts. They offer no argument. They offer invocation.

Together, they invite us to listen differently—not just to what we say, but to what speaks through us when we are most quiet, most present, most alive to the mystery of having language at all.

We do not merely speak.
We are spoken.

The Inversion Cycle: Eight Scrolls of Withheld Grace

The Counterpoint of Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, also called The Wreck of Hope Oil on canvas paint, 96.7 cm × 126.9 cm (1823–1824).
Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, also called The Wreck of Hope
Oil on canvas, 96.7 cm × 126.9 cm (1823–1824).

On the Unmaking of Benediction

This cycle of verses—The Inversion Cycle—emerged not as a contradiction, but as a counterweight to The Blessing of Morpheus: The Sending Forth, a series of benedictions articulated in reverent tones and metaphysical gestures within the poem Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky. That earlier work was rooted in the soul’s deep yearning toward the ineffable, culminating in luminous affirmations bestowed by the dream-god Morpheus upon the seeker. In time, those benedictions came to feel too complete, too resolved. I began to wonder: what if they failed?

The Inversion Cycle is not blasphemy, but a form of apophatic honesty. It does not seek to erase Ponder, but to stand beside it—its negative counterpoint. Each scroll of the cycle corresponds to a specific line or blessing from Ponder and performs an act of unmaking: where Morpheus blesses, these verses refrain; where he sends the seeker into mystery, these verses stall at the threshold; where he assures, they withhold.

To honor that reversal, a further restraint was imposed: the exclusion of the very vocabulary upon which the original work (and many of my other recent works) so often relied. Words such as breath, dust, light, shadow, silence, and memory—among others—have been set aside. Their absence is not a loss but a signal. These are not the tools we are permitted to carry here.

The scrolls appear here in the same order as the benedictions from Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky. This reversal respects the original arc—from the loosening of dreams to the transformation of the soul—and follows its negative path with precision.

What remains is austerity, not despair. These unsacraments do not offer consolation, but they do speak. If Ponder was a song of ascent, then this is the long exhale after the music ends—a psalter of withheld grace, composed in the space where blessing does not descend.

Let this work be read not in defiance of belief, but in the trembling of its undoing. For if it is brave to bless, it is perhaps braver still to stand in the space where blessing will not come—and write there, in the dust, what remains.

Scroll I: Of the Clinging Husk

Let not your dreams fall—
for they will not fall.
They remain,
clinging like husks unpicked,
blackened not by season,
but by refusal.

You will try to cast them down,
but they are fastened,
not to limb,
but to marrow.

They do not curl like leaves.
They do not return to soil.
They sour upon you,
a bitterness in the sinew,
a ferment in the thought.

And if you turn to shake them loose,
they will tighten.
Their threads are not of sleep,
but of habit,
knotted in long forgetting.

There is no wind to lift them.
No frost to loosen them.
No gardener comes.

Remain, then, beneath their burden—
bent,
unshed,
unchanged.

Scroll II: Of the Inscribed Weight

Take them.
You will take them.
You cannot help it.

The names carved into stone,
the words burned into walls,
the cries etched into earth—
they cling not to your pack,
but to your ribs.

You bear them not as titles,
but as scars.

They whisper through your marrow,
resisting every act of unmaking.
You try to enter the place without form,
but they speak before you.
They call the ground by its old name,
and the gate does not open.

Even the sky does not answer
when it hears them rising again.

These names were not carved to remember.
They were carved to bind.

And now,
as you stand at the edge
of the place where all naming ends,
they press their syllables
against your tongue,
and you speak them,
not in defiance,
but because you cannot forget.

Scroll III: Of Implements Abandoned

Bring not the weighted balances,
nor the woven snares of longing.
They do not hold,
not here.

Their handles crack in the frost
where no stars rise to bless the hour.
Their mesh is brittle—threaded not of wool,
but of claims left too long in the mouth.

The mind, honed to edge,
cuts only fog in this place.
The heart, cupped too gently,
spills what it never held.

There are no laurels in this soil,
only reeds that do not bend
and brambles that do not bleed.

And should you cast such tools before you,
expecting fruit, or fire, or favor—
they will return to you as ash,
unsought, unshaped,
the chaff of means
mistaken for ends.

Scroll IV: Of the Withheld Offering

Bring not your hollowed chest,
stripped clean of ornaments and plea.
It will not be filled.

Wonder has no purchase here.
Its gaze returns unreflected
from stone too smooth to be shaped.

Let the mind remain loud and unyielding,
for awe would shatter in this poise
like frost-cracked bronze.

As for your feet—
do not lift them.
There is no basin here,
only ground dry from the beginning,
lined with rings that do not ripple.

The wind does not attend.
It does not lift.
It does not listen.

There is no path across this floor,
only grit,
and the marks of those who came
thinking they would walk upon revelation.

Scroll V: Of the False Horizon

Do not seek.
There is no one to be found.

The sea does not receive you.
It is not fluid,
but glare stretched to the edge of motion—
shimmering not with promise,
but with mirage.

You did not launch.
You drifted.
And your craft was not chosen,
but assigned,
drawn from timbers
meant for no voyage.

The sky above you swells with stars,
but none are true.
Each one marks a path
that bends inward,
circling you back to your forgetting.

You will think you move.
You will call it seeking.
You will call it bold.
But you are already known
by the thing that does not answer.
And it has left no threshold,
only wind
that cannot be charted
and depth that does not hold.

Scroll VI: Of the Barren Threshold

There is no beyond.
Only the gray field where sleep forgets its end
and waking does not begin.

Here, nothing waits.
Not voice, not veil,
not even the last gasp of wonder.

What lies past dream is not fullness,
but poise robbed of sanctity—
the deafness of stones
before their naming.

No stars ever hung above this place.
No fire traced its vault.
Only pallor,
dull as bone in a dry shrine,
untouched by flame or veil.

And death,
so often imagined a gate,
has no depth here.
It is shallow, crusted,
and holds nothing but its own refusal.

Let no one say this place is holy.
It is not what remains made full—
but vacancy made permanent.

A place unmourned.
Uncalled.
Unmade.

Scroll VII: Of the Unbecome

Go not.
There is nowhere that calls.
No road unfurls before you,
no veil parts,
no watchful eye lingers on your vanishing.

The question you bore
was not accepted.
It curled back into you,
like a tongue that feared its own utterance.

You will not be shaped by asking,
nor known by your seeking.
You will remain
as you were before the yearning—
a vessel without fracture,
never poured,
never filled.

No sound will rise behind you.
No trace will stir where your feet passed.
Even the soil will forget your weight.

Be still, not in peace,
but in the form that does not unfold.
Remain—not as the question—
but as that which never found its shape.

Scroll VIII: The Soul Beneath the Blanched Sky

The soul, girded and unmoved,
stood beneath a sky without veil—
a dome blanched of fire,
where nothing had ever gleamed,
only ash adrift from unremembered pyres.

It bore no garment.
No mark of calling or descent.
It was as parchment without script,
unhandled, unblemished, unread.

No winds stirred the plain.
Only cairns rose in rows,
not raised in reverence,
but born of the land’s refusal to yield.

The trees there had no buds.
Their limbs were stiff, as if carved for stillness—
a forest of halted prayers.
And beneath them,
the roots did not seek nourishment,
but curled inward,
content in their forgetting.

There was no calm,
no sacred pause.
Instead, a muttering of syllables
rose from the dry hollows—
sounds without grammar,
without bond,
giving rise to no names,
no intelligible form.

And when the soul pressed its palm
to the ground,
there was no spring,
no pulse,
only crusted clay—
neither moist nor cracked,
a firmness that would not give.

It asked nothing.
Not from pride,
but from knowing
that some places are beyond summons—
places where even longing
has been turned to stone.

Betwixt Dawn and Dusk: A Meditation on Life and Dream

Preface

The first lines of this poem came to me in the night—those strange hours when thought and dream pass like shadows through the mind. I awoke briefly, not fully, and the phrase lingered: between and betwixt dawn and dusk… and the inverse, between and betwixt dusk and dawn. I held onto it until morning, when I set it down in full light. The poem that followed is a meditation on those intervals—the thresholds of consciousness and the veils through which the soul moves in its waking and its dreaming.

What begins as a reflection on the daily arc—from sunrise to sunset—soon turns inward, toward the more uncertain passage between dusk and dawn, where memory, time, and identity unravel and reweave. The Heraclitean epigraph provides the key: “The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” Yet even that distinction, perhaps, is not so firm as it seems.

The accompanying painting—Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket—mirrors the poem’s atmosphere: its drift between form and dissolution, its reverent wondering, its silence punctuated by brief illumination. Together, word and image ask not what life is, but whether it is lived or dreamed—and what remains of us in either case.

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket James McNeill Whistler (c. 1872–1877) Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 46.6 cm (23.7 × 18.3 in) Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
c. 1872–1877 | Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 46.6 cm
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit

Betwixt the Spheres

by Donald S. Yarab

“The waking have one common world,
but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”
—Heraclitus, Fragment 89

Betwixt the dawn’s gold-burnished, trembling rise,
And evening’s hush where embered echoes gleam,
A soul drifts outward under waking skies—
Or inward, through the latticework of dream.

Morning declares the world as firm and real,
Noon lays its claim in certainties and fire,
Yet twilight draws the veil we cannot feel,
And sings the hush of unfulfilled desire.

The hours fall like leaves from unseen trees,
Their passage soft, impermanent, and strange.
Some name it life, who walk it by degrees—
While others call it dream, and feel no change.

So tell me, when the final light has flown,
And silence hangs, unbroken and immense—
Was it a road we walked, and called our own,
Or but a fleeting spark in dream’s pretense?

But what of time when sun has slipped from sight,
And stars drift forth like seeds of the unknown?
What voice is heard within the hush of night,
When all the world lies still, and we—alone?

Between and betwixt the dusk and morning’s grace,
A different kind of being comes to bloom:
Where shadows speak, and time forgets its place,
And long-dead voices gather in the gloom.

In sleep, the veil grows thin, the borders bend,
And hours bleed into realms that none can chart.
The soul recalls what lies beyond the end,
And bears the hush of ages in its heart.

These hours are not lost—they are the deep,
The ocean floor where buried visions gleam.
From them we rise, like wanderers from sleep,
Still marked by fire, still echoing the dream.

So stands the soul, on thresholds vast and wide,
Between and betwixt the turning of the spheres—
What seemed a life, a dream walks at its side,
Measured not in hours, but in wonder—and in tears.

My Friend, You Were There: A Reflection on Complicity

Warsaw Ruins 1944
Warsaw 1944

History shows that evil rarely marches under banners we immediately recognize. Too often, it comes draped in righteousness, purity, and fear. This piece is a lament for how easily we have been—and still can be—drawn into the machinery of cruelty.

My Friend, You Were There

My friend,
When the Holy Catholic Church, seeking to preserve the Faith in all its radiant purity,
instituted the Inquisition,
you were there—
not as a bystander,
but as a willing voice.

You denounced the old widow,
who lived alone with her cat.
You whispered against the Jewish family—
familiar, yet forever marked as other—
and gave your assent to their undoing.

You crowded into the square to watch the trials.
You sang hymns
as the flames crowned their bodies with smoke.
You wept tears of joy
that the world was made purer that day.

My friend,
When the ships came heavy with human cargo,
and the auction blocks stained the soil,
you were there.

You placed your bids.
You weighed their flesh.
You wrote the laws that chained their children.

You sang hymns on Sunday,
and broke their backs on Monday.
You called it providence.
You called it order.

My friend,
When the traders came with flags and rifles,
when the rivers flowed with rubber and blood,
you were there.

You signed the charters.
You counted the profits.
You sold the shackles and the scales.

You called it commerce.
You called it destiny.

My friend,
When the banners of the Reich unfurled,
and the drums of destiny beat their hollow call,
you were there.

You shouted with the crowds
as glass shattered from shopfronts.
You signed the letters,
you cheered the laws,
you raised your hand high in salute.

You bought the house,
the shop,
the art your neighbors were forced to leave behind.

You praised the strong hand
that swept away the weak.
You rejoiced as neighbors vanished,
grateful that your streets were made clean.

My friend,
When Stalin summoned the will of the people
to root out the enemy within,
you were there.

You reported the whispered doubts
of your cousin,
your friend,
your brother.

You paraded with red flags
while the trucks rumbled into the night.
You filled the quotas.
You seized the land.
You counted the spoils
as others disappeared.

You sang of the bright tomorrow
as you cast your eyes down
and stepped over the absent.

My friend,
When Mao lifted the Little Red Book,
and the children cried out against their fathers,
you were there.

You led the chants.
You scrawled denunciations across the walls.
You struck the old professor who dared to hesitate.
You cheered as the temples fell,
and the old poems burned,
convinced you were building a paradise
on the bones of the past.

My friend,
When Pol Pot promised that the fields
would bloom with new life,
you were there.

You marched the teachers into the paddies.
You pointed the rifle.
You praised the year zero
that would erase the memory of all that came before.

You smiled
as the world was reborn in silence.

My friend,
When the generals rose in the name of order,
when the prisons filled and the stadiums overflowed,
you were there.

You nodded at the names.
You counted the profits.
You watched the blindfolded taken at night.

You called it security.
You called it salvation.

My friend,
You have always been there.

Only too late did you realize.
Only too late did you doubt—
but not much.

You fell silent,
lest you betray your doubt.
You looked away,
lest you see.

You told yourself it would be different this time.
You told yourself you had learned.
But the signs are familiar.
The words are familiar.
The silence is familiar.

And it is happening again.

The Unopened Book

by Donald S. Yarab

Scholar in His Study by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1634
Oil on canvas, 141 × 135 cm
Collection of the National Gallery Prague, Schwarzenberg Palace
© National Gallery Prague

The unopened book, its spine uncreased,
rests on the shelf, untouched by breath.
No hand has turned its waiting leaves,
no eye has met its silent depths.

The pages sleep in folded time,
ink unmoved by thought or light—
a universe uncalled to mind,
a star unkindled in the night.

Who knows what worlds it might contain—
a lover’s vow, a tyrant’s fall,
a name that once was yours or mine,
a deathless truth, a whispered call?

The story never yet begun
is writ in ink that does not fade.
Its fate, unlike the morning sun,
has neither risen nor decayed.

And yet—another book lies bare,
its binding worn, its chapters told.
The margins smudged by time and care,
its tale rehearsed a thousandfold.

We read, we skip, we turn again,
we bookmark thoughts we dare not bind—
then falter near the closing lines,
no meaning fixed, no end designed.

A narrative half-read, half-lost,
its final thought left unexpressed—
the thread unwinds, the ink runs dry,
the reader dozes, unconfessed.

Between the two—a paradox:
the never read, the half-complete.
Which holds the weight of what we are?
Which better marks our own defeat?

Perhaps all books are mirrors dim,
reflecting what we dare not see:
the start we fear, the end we flee,
the truths we touch but never free.

So let it lie, unopened still,
or let it fall apart, well-worn—
the soul is both the waiting page,
and every word we leave unborn.