The Crash of Verses

By Rafik Romdhani

If ever there was a crash of abundant beauty in the incomprehensible vastness of experience of complex human emotion — this is it.

Presented by the exquisite mind of Rafik Romdhani, this unique poetry collection will fill you with wonder; it will romance and shatter your heart. There's a mirror to divinity in this talented poet's expression through his delicate art of word architecture.
Come, experience The Crash of Verses. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clan Witch
• Release date: Jun 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201836382

Book preview

The Crash

of Verses

––––––––

Rafik Romdhani

© 2022 Natasha Sinclair.

First Published 2022.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof including all images, may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author and publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Any unauthorised use will constitute as an infringement of copyright.

The Crash of Verses by Rafik Romdhani

Edited by Natasha Sinclair, Word Refinery.

Foreword and cover blurb by Natasha Sinclair.

Cover design by Natasha Sinclair.

https://word-refinery.com

[e-mail]

Other formats available.

ISBN: 9-798-2018-3638-2 (eBook)

Contents

Dedication

Foreword

Acknowledgments

O' Birds!

Life is the Joke of Death

Passing

Wilderness

The Avenue of Verses

Life Goes On

Here

Can I Visit Your Voice?

My Heart was Cut in Two

One Night

While she Reads my Poem

Nets on Me

Sundown Years

Concentrate

The Thunder Thinks Aloud

Vanishing Treasures

They Won't Understand You

Stones

Fever by Verses

Written on a Dog's Tail

Open the Closet of the Soul

If the Sea were Mine

The Night Scatters its Feathers

My Only Char

What is Night?

Winter Memoirs

The only Bridge to my Slow Mouth

My Sifted Dreams

The Theatre of Wild Desires

Uni-verse

The Sea Wave and the Albatross

The Sun Rises from a Woman's Breasts

The Text is Born

My Heart is the Problem

Words Storm

The Desert on my Shoulders

Ah, Poor Heart!

Before I Write a Poem

Your Absence

The World Darkened in my Head

Blurry Dawn

The Fate of our Eyes

Another Bonnemort

Blood to Write Dreams with

Fill your Pockets with Demons

Don't Write Poetry Outside your Eyes

No Ways

A Rose Branch

Mad Pool of Uncertainty

The Army of Chalk

Yawning and Stretching

A Bird Carried by its Own Wings

The Kicks of Poetry

Disappearance

Clear Mirror

Strange Battlefields

Revolution

Each Heart Uncorks Itself

Your Glasses are Thirsty

The Ocean of Gravitations

Poetic Blood

The Siege of Presence

What Colour is your Demon?

The Ovules of Void

Metaphysical Homecoming

Poetry's Warm Waters

The Pillows of Peace

What If?

She Set Fire to my Fire

Breath inside a Labyrinth

The Soul of Beginning

An Eternity Beside Railways

A Poet in a Bank

Poetry Triangle

The Trances of Absence

A Descent on Chests

Dream Under Water

What's Inside

The Smell of Sky

Ache Heals Ache

A Soul Made of Poems

One Day You Die

Dream's Bond

A Rose Like You

The Thread of the Dark

The Last Fig Leaf

My Poems

The Crash of Verses

Living Skulls

Poetry is not Poetry

Deep Exile

Roads

You'll Have What You Want

Indirect Breath

A Giant Bird

The Algae of Death

I'm Coming

The Genes of Poetry

The Same Question

The Last Stop

Fantasy

Gone but not Forgotten

Peerless Ecstasy

In My Country

Earth

In the Cafe

The World is Born laden with Fools

Despair

If only my Pen

Where do you Liberate your Sighs?

Behind Sarcasm

Wrong is Right in the Mind

The Old Man

When Silence Turns to Wind

Her Sea is Rough

Thoughts' Warmth

The Laughing Mouth

Vanishing Treasures

Wings from the Sky

Spleeny Drowning

Words' Worth

The Tower of Dust

The Lost Paradise

Not to Be

Love's Ember

Fantasy's Fort

A Ghost Inside

Life Goes On

The Blanket of The Night

Where Have You Been?

Every Day is Fire Breath

The Speed of Devotion

Time's Venom

The Hands of Hallucination

Life Walks on my Blood

Oleander

There Are Times

An Exploding World

Budding Hearts Faint in Venom

The Flames of Metaphors

Fear

Find a Bed to the Dead

Beneath Hope's Vines

I Have No Chance

The Homecoming of the Sun

The End is a Cage

What Did You Think?

About Rafik Romdhani

About Natasha Sinclair

Dedication

Dedicated to Mbarka, my mother, who worked her fingers to the bone and spent God knows how many sleepless nights for my sake.

May the Almighty God turn back the clock to carry me back to that wise and eloquent Mbarka before her being stricken and stolen by Alzheimer's Disease.

Foreword

There’s depth in getting to know someone through their art, and through making that accessible in publishing, it’s an intimacy that is open to any reader. 

We each interpret words and the melodic rhythm of a piece in our own way, whipping strings through our minds, letting them dance through the cerebellum in a serenade. Instinctively we draw an analysis based on the weaving of the creator, or we churn it — blending verses with our own experiences.

Art connects us across the boundaries of land, religion, politics, sex, gender, and race — art connects us all.

Rafik Romdhani’s skills as a poet are boundless. His poetry can be short and sharp or take you on an emotional journey in history where the heart meets the mind. His verses can be profoundly philosophical or playful and whimsical. Innocence marries with the intense in The Crash of Verses. This is his second published collection, following Dance of the Metaphors, in 2021.

I don’t know Romdhani personally. I know him through his verse, and I am grateful for experiencing this brilliant poet. Some may say we are worlds apart, Romdhani in Tunisia and myself in Scotland; that’s one of the great benefits of working with technology as we do today. The ability to connect and exchange experiences with relative ease. We are all siblings in this little blue and green rock, spinning beneath the same sky, sharing admiration for the cosmos in which we orbit in awe. We love, suffer, create, break, rebuild, dream — we share humanity across borders. We are each other, and that appreciation and acknowledgement of shared and differing experiences is truly divine.

A poet’s calling isn’t an easy path. It may well be one of the hardest when it comes to literary endeavours. Poets are often ‘unseen’, and perhaps now it’s more complex and competitive than ever to find appreciation in life for one’s art, especially when it is a calling that the creator of verse cannot deny. A poet doesn’t want to be a poet — they simply are.

As a fellow creative, I understand the ‘need’ to write, paint a canvas with and untangle the rhymes that pour through the mind and rumble through one’s core. It’s a reflex or a muscle that demands exercising. We become enslaved to art; it’s not always a choice.

Romdhani writes with passion and unwavering determination. There’s an oxymoron of discipline in some of his free verse. Perhaps his passion and discipline as a teacher come together with the ferocity of his creative voice, which is often eager to break the rules. That’s one of the wonderful things about linguistics — understanding the rules well adds power when you choose to break them — poetry is one of the most powerful mediums to utilise that faculty.

It is my privilege as it is yours to be welcomed into Romdhani’s worlds. Like with any collection, not every piece will ‘speak’ to you, but in entering The Crash of Verses, you may be surprised which chords are struck by this strikingly talented wordsmith.

—Natasha Sinclair

Author of Asylum Daughter & Editor (Word Refinery)

April 2022

Acknowledgments

My thanks are due to the valued and highly respected Natasha Sinclair for being more than patient and diligent in editing and publishing this work. 

Who is with you?

Only a poem will whimper with you

And when you laugh, it laughs so true.

O' Birds!

Tell idiots that warplanes

Are an insulting representation of your wings

That don't harm even breezes,

That your backs never carry killing bombs.

Your beaks are too elevated to shoot bullets

On the heads of wheat ears.

They won't leave inside a child unparalleled fear.

What will this world be like after these bigots?

O' birds!

Tell every moron not to trifle with the infinite.

Life will go on no matter what they do to stop it.

Sun will rise from the breast of the last woman.

The blood they shed into pools in utter fun

Is testimony to bloody murders in the mind.

Who cares for orphans in their dark forgotten?

Still, the lesson from Syria hasn't been gotten

O' birds, the reasons behind war stay unfound.

O' birds!