Tariku's Droplets

My Heroes My path in this world has been blessed, By the sweet gestures of deserved 'stubbornness', That my heroes taught me out of kindness; When I met them-my heroes , The unborn day was rolling down to its close, Minutes chipping away by seconds, The sun blushing red on the horizon, Like a good bye – of a newly love stricken lad, Unable to depart the luring beautiful face of her beloved; I was yearning, With a childlike glee and stubborn simplicity, To stop the setting sun, To hold the light, To dip color from the twilight, And in seizing and releasing claim bliss of purpose; When I met them, That yearning of my heart- they empathized; With wisdom borrowed from eternity’s yard; They were sitting on the rugged face of the summit, Of a tall mountain of insight, Rooted on millennial young past, Their faces always filled with delight, And looked at me, like a seer would, And just smiled; Like souls who sto...

The Path‘upward’ and Him  W hen he fought his way up from low, He took all sorts of names: radical, rebel, Fighter for the people, to name a few; And in the desert, the wood and the mount, he spoke: “ We have to fight tyranny in all forms and from all, All powers that be residing  higher  -shall-break ;” And was followed, Millions did applaud. In  owe  to his words fervently wishing him - succeed . When he came up to the palace-where tyranny once been, And the day of reckoning finally dawned upon him, That D-day was in hand, tyranny gone, freedom-won; He felt mused by power and with a stammered stance, In meetings, campaigns and TV-window rants, he spoke: “ We have to fight tyranny in all forms and from all, All powers that be residing  lower  -shall-break.” And was followed, Millions did applaud, In  awe  to his vanity fervently wishing him –   succeeded .   ................... ...

My new Novel Eyes and Mist   

Irony of Existence ……………….. The infallible-careless eyes of nature, Saw the two of them laugh: The lion and the porcupine, In kingdom of strength of the first, And the realm of thorns of the last, With smiles sphinx-like, Fear- dominated- no bail, With mercy of its compromise, Existence lives out its ironies . ……TAE………

Eternity ?                                  Eternity is not endless; Talking of end calls for a start, And it never had a start, For a start entails a past; IT must be that moment Full with history and prospect, yet Where both converged in each other and lost In to a big NOW- A BIG MOMENT. -------------------------------------- (Tariku Abas- Etenesh)

They raised him saying They raised him saying: Take care, And be careful of your foes; When- only dolls were his intimates; They reminded him, saying: Take them , All these 'norms' and ‘NOs’ in mind, When his only rich–was his rational mind; They accused him then at last, Guilty as charged of trespass; Though the only fruits he bore Was what they in him, sow; With out a seer’s wisdom or a vision- to live for. ............................................................ (TAE)

Heaven of evils? If as they say: When one loves, Along germinates the seed of hate, And when one gains, In the heart is sown the seed of loss, I wonder where ‘heaven’ of all evils be set, If no pursuit was there for the best? -------------------- (By TAE) 

When did Seeking only Accord become Democratic!   Tariku Abas Etenesh  Following the death of the late Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, p ictures -both old and new, Photoshop-treated postcards, animated status updates and expressions of condolences had become the common features of the past two weeks on the social media, especially Facebook.  The best and the worst in many people have got the chance to spill over and claim attentions in their own right. Nowhere could this mixed display could be seen more vividly that in the electronic and social media. However, after the state burial ceremony of the PM, one  more troubling  phenomenon  threatens to claim  attention in the form of a  bashing spree in the social media . These bashing tendencies have as their ‘credit’ and ‘excuse’ the supposed good or bad legacies of the late Prime Minister to throw spears of attacks towards others in some easy-to-att...

Then the gods Laughed  I took a tour around and inside, a museum and saw memorabilia of times past; Displayed in many forms and shelved, But under a common name identified; Underneath them all written, I read:  “gods of past civilizations.”   After visiting a myriad of such labeled beings, I asked:  “Where are the spots prepared?   for the gods of today to be shelved?”   Only then I heard loud laughter explode,   And turned to see it coming from each godhead:   Baal, Zeus, Horus, mythra and their entire league,   All labeled “past gods” saying in a rhythmic chorus:   “ Same is today as with us it had been,    No soul in our times thought we could wear out and p ass,    With the millennia and minds that fashioned us .”    -------------------------   (PTS, 2009)

A Tale of Two Drum Beats By Tariku Abas Etenesh (First appeared on  www.theethiopianamerican.com ) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ቅዳሴ እና አዛኑን አጥር ቢለያቸው፡  ፈጣሪ ከሠማይ አንድነት ሰማቸው፡፡  …… “Liturgy and Azan(Salah), apart by a thin fence*, The Almighty of Heavens heard them as one voice . (Teddy Afro) Whenever I hear Tewodros Kassahun’s (aka Teddy Afro’s) classic song “Shemedefer,” it reminds me of my friend Mohammed Ali. Did the name Ali trigger a memory timeline and bring to life an image of a legend? I thought so. But let me save you the surprise: the young, flamboyant, greatest boxer of all time—“king of the world” (as he deservedly called himself)—is not the Ali I’m writing about. My friend Ali wasn’t even born when the great boxer became a champion not only of professional boxing, but also of the struggle against the grim reality of racial segregation in 1960s America. The ...

How could I know I am ‘the African’? By Tariku Abas Etenesh (First appeared on www.theethiopianamerican.com) Whoever had said books are good companions, deserves a nod of approval from anyone who had actually made friends out of books. Some books get you new experiences, and others give you new paradigms. I had read one of the latter kinds, years ago, that deservedly lent me, since then, a perspective to frame a question as a reply for the seemly conventional view about Africa and all Africans in the mainstream western rhetoric and conception of the continent. Sight Unseen The book is entitled ‘Sight Unseen,’ and recounts an unusual conversation between two philosophers, one sighted and the other visually impaired, both working at philosophy departments of two universities. The book is a collection of emails the two professors exchanged on a topic selected by the sighted one who wanted to explore what 'reality' meant for the blind. The book recounts how the first ...

Ode to *Sengbe Pieh (By Tariku Abas Etenesh ) J ust the other day, I was walking by the shore lines of *Mende, Where I looked foot prints on the sand, Not disturbed by the ebbs and tides, Nor washed by the winds; Wondering how it remained, By sea or land breeze undisturbed; I looked around in search of any wise mind, With the knowledge of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ Of the feet that pressed the marks so deep and hard, “Whose foot prints are these?” I asked, For which, I got a reply from a teacher of some kind,  “ Never knew or cared to; must be some one’s, But why worry yourself with the past, any way ?” Then the teacher walked away. Stunned by the futility of the reply, For the answer, along the trace did I stay; Only at night when the moon joined the ebbs, In what looked an eternal whisper of serenity, Composed in the rhymes of the tides and the sands, The moon looked down on me  with a smile, And said “I can tell you the s...