Kimono Moon

"Noh Theatre is a traditional Japanese masked drama with dance and song, evolved from Shinto rites."


While visiting an exhibition of Noh Theatre costumes, I read this on one of the placards. I just love how expressively it describes the beauty of this art form:

"Noh is a spectacle of such dislocating awe and beauty that a viewer is disarmed of expectations tethered to the world of everyday experience. The luxuriousness of Noh costumes - layer upon layer of silk, pattern upon pattern, wonder into wonder - transports the viewer beyond mere reality into a coalescing and dissolving realm of shapes and signs. Action is pared to suggestion. Hypnotic music and a nearly bare stage concentrate the imagination. Intensity replaces action as the dramatic force. Through these abstract means, the actor takes the audience beyond the particular to the universal, and through the surface to the wellspring of feeling ... a Noh play is completed inside the audience's heart."  -written on placard at a Japanese Noh Theatre exhibition ♥ 

kimono moon beams

draped around your sky shoulders

holding up the night 

Lanterns & Lights

Hurt upon hurt

together they build 

and the barriers they create 

are sullen wingless things

riding the flank of dark stillness

no flight of their own ... sadness personified

Within the realm of reason and longing

these still wingless things are powerless

unless given power by the heart that chooses

to fuel them ... 

And oh how they can lull the senses ... 

Deep inside the chamber of longing

the place that poets know,

that place that is kin to all - poets and dreamers alike

And those that think they feel no song

I am sure they do

It just got lost somewhere inside

But there are lanterns

and lights

that shine the way 

and take one home

to the place that is full of

welcoming arms 

and unspoken thoughts 

Because within this haven of safety

there is no need for sadnesses

There is but need for

the solace that the familiar carries,

the familiar that is one's soul

carried and cradled far within

The home of self

that searches to see, to find, if there is a 

place residing within another - that same sort of place

that sees without sight

and hears without ears

and feels without touch

and sings without voice

The place where senses both known and unknown

sigh deeply - contentedly - free of form - yet completely whole. ~sjp