Farabi's Castle

It smells musty gun powder; his little face fits in
the elongated rectangular of the loopholes-
thin slits that admit light into his dark tower
where colors become slaves to masonry.

Alone with his childish fears
and the reminiscences of past few days
trapped in that chamber
and body consumes light.
The walls question; dig them, hit and wiggle.
Playing hide-and-seek,
he is always the one to seek.
Rotating around the moving walls
nails blotted with dirt,
wisdom, a hunch on his back.
No eye can pry into him, no finger can point him.
He had a lifetime to materialize:
Why is it that yellow light passes through the loopholes
sometimes and other times not?


a modern scientist repeats him on and on
That in the quantum of a black hole
light is distorted in a whim:
an eye on the invisible.
The blindness was not void.
It was human trial, testament for the things to come.
He tried to draw circles, triangles, and squares
though he lived in a quadrangle
of barriers where no Otherness had breached.


Meva Ayse