Prelude To ‘poetics’ Of Aristotle Poem by Sadiqullah Khan

The apocalyptic maestro’s dialogue
Whatever he said, whether wrote or not
Of politics and philosophy
History’s scribbled pages, lost, found and lost
Again. Reason’s unblemished castle
The armies select, carrying banners of divinity
Feared not the death, nor a defeat but O ye!
May some one from a pouch, from a hidden hearth
Spell your name, or your master’s or the master’s master.

Macedonian, an Athenian, a Greek symbol
When the rest of the world painted their faces blue
Or were clinging to the trees, apelike, he was writing
And teaching philosophy. An ultimate touchstone
An ultimate reason, Pupil of the great Plato
Surpassed, toned him down –the radical transformer
Let there be a room for the common sense
Let emotion prevail; let intuition be not inimical to sense.

We undertake by a grace, human
An account into Poetics, of whatever might be understood
By a feeble mind, frail heart, unaccustomed
With wit, a study to what we call poetry
As embellished by him, as it came down to us, fragmented
For with all probabilities, he never wanted the work
To be published, handed down by himself, or by a pupil
One of the four hundred treatises written by him.

Thus we conclude, having written the above
That all word that uttered his mouth, which came on his tongue
Despite the written, was creativity, unique, unparalleled
A science, deductive, in logic and to the posterity
For all times to come, empirical, for generations.

Sadiqullah Khan
Islamabad
September 10,2013.