When was the last time you revisited innocence?

Return to Innocence

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by Stan Faryna

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Enigma, Return to Innocence

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Despite (and because) of our fears, tears, wounds, trials and tribulations, we must return to innocence – again and again. We must return to innocence to be truly ourselves. In innocence, there are wonders, joys, gratitude, and joi de vivre.

And by innocence, I do not mean selfish egotism, ignorance, false consciousness, delusion, careless license, or self-deceit. By innocence, I mean, sanctity. Purity of heart.

Enigma’s song, Return to Innocence, reminds me of my need to revisit the place of innocence. And sometimes, the song takes me there. To innocence.

It may take you there too. For a moment. But if it does – even if only for a moment – it will fix you.

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Stan Faryna
17 June 2013
Fairfax, Virginia

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Superfluous

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Superfluous

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by Stan Faryna

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Macklemore, Ryan Lewis and Ray Dalton, Can’t Hold Us

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There are friends with whom I shall never share poetry. Because, unfortunately, poetry is superfluous to those who lack an intellectual spirit. Or spiritual life.

Or brave heart.

I’m not obsessed with poetry. It’s not a daily ritual for me. Nor weekly. But reading it (or remembering it) on occasion, one may find a place for the genuine – as the American modernist poetess Marianne Moore put it.

Today, there may be no necessity for the genuine when our questions can be managed with addictions, prescriptions, hook ups and outrageous materialism. Until you want to live wholeheartedly, feel strongly and love… fiercely and truly.

And only then will you know that you too cannot live without great books, beautiful music, art, illuminated friends and, oh yes, poetry.

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Stan Faryna
15 June 2013
Fairfax, Virginia

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Poetry

by Marianne Moore

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I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician–
nor is it valid
to discriminate against ‘business documents and

school-books’; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
‘literalists of
the imagination’–above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’, shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

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