I Have Been Moved (2nd Edition)

By Yacov Mitchenko

Are you looking for a poet who thinks that it's possible to be lucid yet deep? Would you welcome verse that's NOT mired in political correctness or identity politics? A poetry that's not tethered to any particular movement? Would you like to read poetry in which spellbinding rhythms, lapidary language, fresh metaphors/associations, and interesting ideas are abundantly present? How about poetry that seeks for the sacred without being caught in outmoded religious thinking? If these are some things you'd like, Yacov Mitchenko is the poet for you.

Sophisticated without being pedantic, emotional without being sentimental, accessible yet multi-layered, mystical and well grounded, Mitchenko's poetry shows immense range. There are metaphysical poems ("Poem," "You Are Not Yourself"), poems about family ("Mother to Son," "For My Son," "Red Cottage Days"), wonderful nature poems ("Amsterdam Park," "March 22nd"), love poems ("You're Lying There Still Asleep," "Because of You, in Light of You"), a meditative, philosophical sequence featuring the "Anonymous One," and poems that celebrate diversity, cultural or otherwise ("Despite Cultural Differences," "Poem For the World," "More Beautiful Differences"). Overall, Mitchenko's poetry is an attempt to engage with the world and with oneself at a profound level.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jul 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9780228896036

Yacov Mitchenko

Yacov Mitchenko was born in Hadera, Israel on April 5th, 1973. In 1975 he and his parents immigrated to Montreal, Canada, where he still lives. He has majored in philosophy at Concordia university and has quietly worked at his poetic craft since his late teens. He recently returned from South Korea, having taught English there for a period of 11 years.

Book preview

I Have Been Moved

2nd Edition

I Have Been Moved 2nd Edition

Copyright © 2023 by Yacov Mitchenko

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-9602-9 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-9601-2 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-9603-6 (eBook)

In Memory of My Mother,

Alissa Mitchenko.

Table of Contents

Seeing The Anonymous One

Poem

I Have Been Moved

Deny Me

Her Genius

The Need

The Young Man

The More and Emptiness

My Wife

Shattered Mirror

Well of Wells

She Loves Me

The Whole Artwork

I Walk With You

Expectation

Since All Things Fall Apart

Everywhere

It Used to Matter

You Sit, Face Averted

Human Consciousness

Severe and Uncompromising Lover

Lucid Streams of Deference

Highways of Heaven are Brittle

First Love (1)

First Love (2)

Stream

Creative Longing

Mozart’s Requiem

Purify Purify

The Proof

Prayer

Distant Cousin of Epilepsy

The King’s Court

Memories

The Seizure

Red Cottage Days

A Stepmother

The Contrast

One Summer

Homeless Shelter Memories

Though a Home Was Offered

More Precious Still

A Veil Lifted

One Treehouse

March 22nd

The Interview

One January Afternoon

The Storekeeper

More Than a Pleasant Diversion

Summers at Orford Music Camp and After

A Brother’s Return to Hongseong

Not on Account of My Will

Meditations

Begin Early

This Subtlety

October Panther

A Remaining Child

Virtue’s Dress

Not Enviable

A Sadness, or Something Deeper

Meditation

You Are Not Yourself

Needlessness and Need

The World of Opposites

Amsterdam Park

Autumn Tree

Cherry Blossom Tree

The Trees’ Ode to Emily Dickinson

A Human Face

The Sunlight’s Bittersweet Themes

Along the Thames

Chinese Whispers and Beyond

The Wheel

Sorrow is a Mercy

I Dreamt Once…

You Need Not Be a Lover of the World

Beauty Beyond

The Journey

Forgiveness

The Choice

Religion and Religiousness

Are We Free?

Listening

You Shall Still Have to Part

Illusion and Truth

Dangers in Oneself

A Certain Faith

Two Kinds of Love

Originality and Integration

Live

Trust

Education Today

Children of a Darkened Mind

Countless Channels

Family

On His Daughter’s Coming Birth

First Snowfall

For My Son

For Both Our Sakes

The Sad Glimmer

On the Bed

A Way Out Please

My Father

Bear Your Burden Bravely

For My Niece, Lara

Security and Shelter

The Butterflies and Blazing Shoulder

My Mother

Mother to Son

For a Loved One

Brother, Come Back to Us

On the Child’s Return

Quiet Influence

Companion of Christmas Trees

Song of an Ailing Grandmother

Acceptance

Her Sorrow

Mother’s Jewel in My Pocket

Soul

Unswerving Devotion to the Father

My Dad

The Glowing Arc

Friends

Poem For a Friend

Honoring Me

Despicability

Harm

For My Friend

Back From Overseas

If You Ring the Doorbell

Guest of this Hour

Meditation of a Middle-Aged Man

Here and Now

Bowl of Fruit on a Summer Morning

Rain

The Lesson of Deep Sleep

Billowing Rain on a Sunday

She Did Not Wail

Svetlana

Isabell, the White Roses, and Perfection

Here is Dear

Hand

Masters

Conversations With Mortality

Reborn

Real and Unreal

Terminal Cancer

The Blessing Turned Savage

August ³rd

Ocean

Lovely Sun

Among the Worst Deaths

Control

Come and Tell Me, Death

May Death Be a Friend

The Gentleman

Some Questions For You

Plucked From the Flowerbed

He Came to Me the Other Night

Lovers

You’re lying there still asleep, the sheets

Possession Within Non-Possession

Because of You, in Light of You

Beyond Rational Selfishness

The Transmutation

Loneliness

Blossoming From the Ground of Your Truth

For Wendy

Prompted

It Was Not Loneliness…

Her Indifference

Song of Integration

Lara’s Song

Anna’s Song

Necklace of Moons

The Return

Strange Friends

Easier to Love God Than You

Dependence and Fear

Distractions

Cool Law

Her Resentment

Last Night

Mercy Oh Lord

Neither Peaceful Nor Free

The River and Good Wine

Mixed Feelings

Impossibility

The Anonymous One Speaks

Leaving These Palace Gates

Longing Long Misunderstood

One and Only Abode

All There Is

Recollection

In Light of My Descent

I Was Bored and Tired

In the Desert

What Prevails

You’ve Prayed to Me

Beautiful Body

Without You

Unseen Servants

My Apparent Helplessness

Foolish

I Consider Where You Are

Dependence

Sacred Space

Never Having Known Me

While You Still Have Your Youth

The Journey Through Dualities

Cold January Sunlight

Self-Awareness

What Would It Be Like?

Where Would I Be Without You?

Going Beyond Likes and Dislikes

Poverty

Continuing Dream of Love and Hate

Silent Killer

The Act is First

I Saw You Every Step of the Way

I Hardly Think…

Monologue of the Mind

A Moment

Conflict of the Mind

Pain

Pain and Thought

The Deceiving Child

The Fish Tanks

The Hunter and the Hunted

The Circling Tyrant

Danger

Uncategorizable

Unfurling From My Comfort Zone

Unseen Forces

Child of Self-Understanding

That One

9/11 and Grace

The Satan Myth Reimagined

Thomas R. Intellect

Confession of a Judge

Paul’s Confession

The Chase

For the World

Poem For the World

The Two Sentences

The Door Slightly Ajar

As You Climb Toward the Mountain Peak

Despite Cultural Differences

Sane Outsider

Photos and Yearning

Visit to Canada

January ²⁷th

With Us Here

Picture of Me

Smarter Than Smart

The Mastery of Language

More Beautiful Differences

The Spy and the Core of Cores

The Sublime Power

The Sublime Power’s Response

Death as Actor

Death Speaks on Judgements

The Young Physicist

On Compassion

The Middle Way

Ode to Consciousness

Simplicity

Ode to Sophia

A Train at Four O’clock in Seoul, South Korea

Awe

During the Pandemic

Those Twelve

The Silk Scarf

Cote-Des-Neiges Street, Montreal

To My Beloved

Ode to Your Rainbow Road

Afraid of Death?

During the Pandemic

The Wanderer Looking for a Place to Stay

Herman Sitting on His Balcony

Unless He Comes into His Own

Deprivation

Daniel

At the Tobacco Store

A Sombre and Petulant Man

February 28th, 2023, Montreal

The Whole

Ode to Breathing

4 Languages

August ¹¹th, 1997

Mothers

A More Powerful Love

Worthy to be Slain

Convalescence

Surrender

Delightful Rebirth

Groom and Bride

Insight

Dangers of Talking and Thinking

What is This?

Part of My Musical Score

A White Feather Floating Away

Seeing The Anonymous One

Poem

Poem on the page -

where meanings dance or drink champagne

or brood or bellow on different floors

of a skyscraper . . .

Poem on the page

where vulnerability may be intertwined

with lust and rage,

where beauty still can be

while attended by the me.

Poem of the human body well made,

poem of the cheetah running,

poem of the hawk’s eyes ablaze

all witnessed by the poem of the sun -

yet none (except the few and sun),

because the me yet holds the heart,

is even close to the perfection of art.

Trees, hills, land, comet aslant, ablaze,

the spheres, star,

the human ablaze

with a wider body are not far.

But nothingness, emptiness - call it what you will -

unswayed, unobstructed by desire or will,

pure spontaneity, is the perfect poem, unbound,

because the Poet cannot be found.

I Have Been Moved

I’ve been moved by still pine trees, summer-crowned,

Picnic-laughter rippling from summer’s heart,

And cathedral bells’ architectures of sound.

I’ve been moved by white sculpture, trance of space,

By my friend approaching, warming the ground,

And standing by me, soaked in the sculpture’s grace.

I’ve been moved by a ragged old man’s stare

As the old man sat in the coffee shop,

By a woman’s passing, startling air,

A woman with stateliness leaving the place,

Her beauty, like a bullet, unacquainted with care.

I’ve been moved by her, the swinging door

And rushing wind; I’ve been moved by more,

Most deeply by things in their element

That never tried to move, never sought

To change me, nor gave me a moment’s thought.

But I’ve never yet been moved by a tower

Of argument; the spiral staircase shown

Has impressed, yes, but never struck the bone,

And the pristine rigor flaunted by the art

Met with only more resistance from the heart.

Deny Me

You want joy as countless others do.

I’m far from blaming you.

But your approach, your devices,

your ways are suspect: trying to find

joy in geography, in material things,

in beautiful faces, exotic places,

in entertainment whose petals quickly fade

are stories of which fools are made.

Poised on the surface of things

does not make one Aphrodite on foam.

You need to go inwardly, go back home.

Reject meditation as arduous, trying,

or boring or unaccommodating to busy lives

or too strenuous, and you’ll be sighing . . .

All the pleasures served out to your pride

will be proportionate to the shadows

gesticulating where fulfillment’s denied.

I invite your denials: deny Me

with your laser logics and all your heart.

Doubt, investigation are not anathema to Me,

cool toward those in whom doubt plays no part.

Your deep questionings are oxygen to Me,

your deep questionings reinvigorate Me.

Want joy? I urge you: into the heart

go deeply, not shirking doubt or fear,

and the more courage flowing in the flesh of doubt,

the more will a joy draw near.

Her Genius

On the restaurant’s wall,

she smiles, her teeth fresh milk for the eyes,

she smiles, a summer orchestra of hills,

her hair a sweep of birds reaching for the sky . . .

She holds a bottle of vodka.

This is happiness

or pleasure wearing the mask

of happiness.

She possesses the heart of entertainment,

she possesses the heart of diversion,

she can be in an old ugly man

appearing on the TV screen

when the man shuts off

thoughtfulness, consideration.

Flashing, swirling images on the screen,

special effects spreading their peacock wings

while the characters are scarcely born,

while the characters are wan and cardboard-thin,

are among her many dreams.

While children play computer games

she looks from the computer screen,

playing with their minds.

While the man’s eyes glaze over watches

shown in the glass display,

immersed in the quiet pleasure of selecting,

while he selects the watch, buys it,

she watches him from the watch,

wrapping her band about his wrist,

drawing him more deeply in time.

While we hop from desire to desire,

she blurs the distinction

between freedom and desire,

comfort and happiness,

her genius convincing us her teeth are fresh milk,

she’s a summer orchestra of hills,

her hair a sweep of birds reaching for the sky . . .

The Need

You can peek through the blinds

as I pass by.

You can wear spring, teasing

any given bough,

watch me through my white cat’s eyes

or like sunlight lightly touch me - for now.

But I need to get my affairs in order,

need to make more money than I do now,

allow my worldly desires to play out more,

need to increase my store

before I see you in all your nakedness.

I turn to you when I’m bent to the floor . . .

Ashamed, I almost see you as mistress

when my wife, the world, is full of rainbows,

as the height of glory when I’m steeped in woes.

Ashamed, I don’t turn to wisdom for wisdom’s sake.

I turn to wisdom to get me out

from circumstances spawned by doubt,

conceit, fear, cleverness, pleasure,

looking to you not to be freed,

but that I may better avert

shit, adjust my tools - and succeed.

How much of you have I conjured

to cater to that need?

The Young Man

Sometimes when she saw someone turn around

The corner, or pass through a restaurant door,

Or when spring with its symphonic score

Of buds performed and surged without a sound,

She felt him, a presence, an absence, and more . . .

There was no longer grief, but a strange pain,

A part of her that thought the young man hadn’t died,

A part that thought she would meet him again.

But she knew, she knew it was fantasy,

Though the fantasy bore a grain of truth.

Certainly the vibrancy, the light of this youth

Looked through the eyes of the passersby,

Looked through the eyes of those

Sitting at the restaurant tables, looked from the sky

When summer was absorbed in poetic blue,

When winter was absorbed in the sharpest prose.

When the young man was alive, they would share . . .

Presence had reached an exuberant pitch

Of love, adventure - but his absence would stitch

A raiment of wisdom which she would wear,

Being led back to her majestic heart,

Being guided through life - breathing art.

The More and Emptiness

Anonymous One,

We can trace spiral staircases of ocean waves,

Geometries of blue reaching for the sun.

Eyes and universe can become good friends;

The contact can unfurl order in all we do.

If we can embrace that which is prior to thought,

Stars will take off their haughty robes and bow;

They’ll be as loving as leaves are to the bough.

But thousands upon thousands of years

Have been transcended by only a few

Because the More’s been master in much that we do.

The master has taught us a few things, yes;

He may be a friend but is an enemy too,

For he builds walls, and therefore emptiness

And isolation are; hearts are heavily billed

When the mind pursues, pursues, when mind is filled.

The More convinces us there is something to become,

That without becoming somebody, there’s no progress.

Yet the More’s wife is Irony: mind’s made numb,

Repetitive, conflicted; She has an attractive dress

That shimmers and glitters when She dances,

But no gate of heaven is, only emptiness.

The striving, striving is only more of the same.

Without the heart’s stillness, order’s only a name.

My Wife

Anonymous One,

If I turn my eyes from You, lovely words,

My thoughts become a screen through which I see:

There is no creation, I am my own

Enemy, kin of Narcissus, like a painter turned to stone

By his painting, as though he tried to fit

The kaleidoscopic world into that one image alone.

Words, too, are like young women in an office room:

I work with them, admire their forms, their dress,

But my Wife awaits me, and true happiness.

She is Woman without image I cannot leave

As I cannot leave myself, or if I try,

I shall grow old as Adam, I shall grieve.

So when I work, I work afresh, anew

Because I feel You inside, only You.

I flow in time, though not of time, a joy

Which no diverting pleasures would destroy.

You lead me not to comfort, but open spaces;

Of shelter, security there are no traces.

After all the thoughts, images that float

During day, in and out of the office room,

I return with delight

Naked, vulnerable, to the Night.

Shattered Mirror

Anonymous One,

The mirror once stood still as Your radiant smile.

The stars’ clarity bowed before Adam’s eyes.

Then it shattered somehow, and the fragments’ guile

Started playing out with scheming surprise.

Each deemed itself a unique culture and nation;

It dreamed forth different faiths and hierarchy;

It dreamed forth good and evil; each person’s station

Competed with another, and the enemy

Or one fought against was inevitably born.

Someone posted up a flag, and a flag was torn

Or burned by someone else; the crusader’s mind,

Sword-intent, tried converting the equally blind.

Much later, there was the democratic crusade,

The axis of evil parade and charade.

What the axis of evil intimated was not

That the good would flower forth, be gloriously brought

Into the open, once light had vanquished dark,

But only how destitute both sides are of Your spark.

The source of chaos and madness is not a foreign kind,

But the long-divided, fragmented mind.

Well of Wells

Anonymous One,

it hurts. It’s as though the

had the poetry of the universe,

had shimmer outshining cathedral bells,

whose bucket bore the heart of seas,

whose water overheard heaven in the breeze,

and it was there, available to all,

a stillness whose freedom needed no wings.

Yet so few visit. Lesser things

seize the majority of hearts and eyes

as entertainment and information

distract from what’s quietly pure and wise.

It hurts. Beauty beyond form resides there,

yet the music’s incomplete, lacking care,

and abundance becomes a burden to bear.

For all the doors of heaven, sadness sees dearth,

a crystal key unused, as genius

sometimes sees it’s of little worth.

She Loves Me

Years ago I had gotten away

from her who seemed a threat.

In relief and comfort I found myself

quietly set.

Now I see she had assumed

other forms, other eyes,

and true to habitual form,

I didn’t do otherwise.

I had discovered the art

of dodging and fleeing

the precarious part,

at best half-seeing.

Perhaps another wound or scar

would have opened me to more

than the light of a star,

nothing less than my core.

Like grace she may have been

doing little more than reaching out,

while I saw deception but not

the deceiver mired in doubt.

Now I’m out and about,

more at home with her (with me).

I’ve retained some healthy doubt,

but not the enemy.

She sometimes speaks to me

through feelings as well,

a storm that would break the norm,

a storm with a tale to tell.

It could be anger, jealousy,

excitement along with fear,

some elation or ecstasy

just to remind me she is here.

She’s queen, too, of internal din,

scattering what’s consoling, warm,

seeking to engage my discipline,

poetic powers that would transform.

She loves me: her shock and shake

bring me back to the Alone.

She wants me to awake

to my