Once upon a time, the angels in heaven were on a break from their divine duties. The angels have their break during the last extra six hours of a year, before the earth makes a full circle around the sun. The six hours fall on November 1 earth time, from 12:00 till 6:00 a.m. GMT.
The favorite past time of these lily-white spirits the size of a bee hummingbird during these six hours is to flock down to earth in their multitude and sit on the clouds in the sky and watch human beings go about their day to day…
Life is not a noun, goes a saying, it is a verb. Another goes so far as to proclaim that God, too, is not a noun, but a verb. While these statements are meant to be motivational, in the spirit of Invictus, which means unconquerable or uncontrollable in Latin, that is, the attitude that we are the masters of our fate, that we determine our own destiny through our actions, the sayings could not be further from the truth; they are simply untrue motivations. …
Forgive the cliché ( but then can anyone ever say anything of substance, meaning in today’s world without coming off as cliché, corny, or even parochial?) —but what if this thing we call life, existence, is, in truth, painting, that we are really painters, seated before our respective canvas, in the act of one live portrait painting, and that every word we utter, action and reaction we take, thought we entertain in our mind, and feeling we hold in our heart, are strokes on that canvas; and that the portrait we are painting is this invisible figure posing before us…
I do not sign on with the Black Lives Matter movement although my skin is black as the moonless, starless sky. This is a decision I have made after visiting the tombs of and consulting with all my negro ancestors — the slaves abducted from their homes, shackled with heavy chains around their necks, wrists, ankles; toiled like an ox in the plantation; their backs flogged to their bare nerves; reduced to subhuman beings. I sat among them and proudly told them about Black Lives Matter and the strides it is making in terms of kicking out racism, improving black…
Yes, you!
It is 6:21 pm, Saturday, June 5, 2021. I sit here, on this spot, 35.6 latitude, 140.1 longitude, a Starbucks inside a mall, bent over my notebook.
I come here to write. I am a wannabe creative writer. The coffee shop provides me with the right dose of distraction — chatters of passers-by; the low music; measured movements of the limbs of the people inside; the myriad colours of their attires; unobtrusive scent of perfume, coffee, and snacks, etc — whence I sense the slightest tingle of imagination, creativity in me.
I have sat here since 10:23:43 am, the receipt…
the desecration of the English language
A tall, drunken teenage boy staggers into the study room and walks up to two girls engrossed in their group work.
“And how are my sainted sisters doing this evening?” he slurs.
The girls merely raise their eyes and give him agitated look.
“D-don’t give me the martyred look na — I didn’t know we’d a group assignment” he grumbles.
“Look Mat, for your own sake, be serious — ” the older girl starts.
“Spare me from another of your sermons, hun” he interrupts as he struggles to sit down, “just throw me my part, ok?”
He squints over the…
I was on one of my frequent excursions into the imaginary world. This time I wandered much farther than usual. The long, aimless amble brought me onto the curious, ominous sight of a group of thirteen evil spirits convening around a round table. A spirit in red mantle over the black overall that they were all wearing, sat on the head of the table and delivered a speech to the attentive subordinate fellow dark spirits. I eavesdropped him making the following chilling remarks.
“Sodomy, check. Next on the list is murder. We shall get humanity to embrace killing as their…
A passage in the Gospel that I often pass upon as insignificant intrigues me:
[Jesus] sent two of his disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it.’” (Luke 19: 29–31).
This seems an insignificant detail in the whole constellation of the words and deeds Jesus said and did when he walked on earth. Yet, first it is one that…
I am disconcerted to find, kneeling over the grave of my wife of twenty-three years, a man I have never seen before. My wife has been resting for a year and four months and nineteen days now.
The stranger starts to his feet at my sight. He is elder, about my age (I am 63), cotton white hair, in grey tailored pants and white shirt. I notice a fresh Camilla flower (her favourite!) across the gravestone.
“Who is this man mourning my wife,” I wonder, as I eye him with unease.
Was my wife having an affair with him? Or…
I don’t want to know you. I don’t. And no, I mean ‘know’ not in the Biblical sense, (you know, ‘Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived’) — heaven knows how much I want to know you, in that sense! (Did I just say that out loud?!). I mean ‘know’ in its literal sense.
I don’t want to know you because I cannot know you without reducing you, your magnanimity, your cosmic beauty to the smallness and plainness of my mind, without putting hallow labels upon you. …
