George Lysloff

Poems and Stanzas II George Lysloff

POEMS AND STANZAS II The following poetic reflections were not included in my first published book of "Poems and Stanzas". I let them gather strength and body, and I have now decided to make them into a companion to the first collection of my verses. Those poems belong to three different groups. The first one is a run of incidental pieces expressing personal and inspirational ideas and emotions I intuited in verses, they are contemporary and totally original. The second group is a trio of poems I initially did render in the French language. They are translations from a work by writer and poet Jakub Kolas from Bielorus. He created a famous lyrical and nationalistic book with the title of "SIMON MUZYKA", the fictive name of a juvenile dreamer who grew up and lived in a small village of White Russia. The boy senses very acutely the subjugation of his land by the rulers of the Russian Empire, and the centralized rule of the Great Russians. Some years ago I ran into the English translation of a couple of those pieces on a Canadian site, written by a Canadian poetess; yet I felt it did not adequately render the pathos of Kolas' lines. So I decided to put my mind to task and came up with my own version of those three pieces. Finally I selected a number of the more lyrical chapters in my book "From that Side of Awakening", written in quasi poetic prose, and transposed them in somewhat more orthodox and better-metered pieces of versification! As in the first volume of the "Poems and Stanzas" those items reflect my philosophical way of thinking, including what I call "transcendentalism". They deal with the concept of a spiritual split occurring within an amorphous entity I call the Prime One, resulting in the Creation of the Universe in the polarized and dual mode, accompanied by the "Fall" and banishment of the one aspect of the Prime entity that brought on the initial "Big Bang". That aspect of the One is destined to assume the role of the all-encompassing God- Nature of the World, to be its Creator, projected and reflected ad infinitum in every facet of the Reality he authored, at the same time to be the common soul of all its biological denizens, both in the individual as in the general sense..