Great News From India: My Poetry Included in a University Textbook :)

Reaching a new audience is always a privilege. When I used Facebook, regularly (before migrating to Steemit, six months ago :) it intrigued and humbled me to learn that I was gaining something of an Indian following. My books were reviewed, more than once, in the press there, such as the most widely-read Indian newspaper, The Hindu and I had Indian editors and readers asking about how to purchase my work on the great subcontinent.

Yet, another reason to believe that words have a life of their own and find their own readers. Besides, India was an ancient civilization with a rich culture and the Indians I knew were big readers, so it made sense that they would be interested in philosophy, spirituality and poetry. Nonetheless, it was another order of surprise and gratitude to receive this email:

We are putting together a textbook for undergraduate students of Punjabi University, Patiala. The university recommends the inclusion of the poem ‘What do Animals Dream?’ by Yahia Lababidi, for which, we understand, copyright rests with you.

For your reference, the details of the textbook to be published are as follows:

Title of textbook: The Poetic Palette (For Punjab University, Patiala)
Author: Board of Editors
Publisher: Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd
Print run: 16,500 copies

"Animals Dream" is an especially lucky poem, I admit, as it has been featured in anthologies, including "Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing" a textbook used throughout US colleges, too. But to reach Indian university students, as well, and somehow shape their literary tastes as impressionable young readers, this was an honor I scarcely dared to dream of when I was a college student with vague ambitions to become a writer!

The poem is and is not, actually, about animals. A peek behind the curtain: the piece was occasioned by a sleeping dog, rapid eye movement, and soon veered into an exploration of the human condition and the interstices, liminal spaces between waking, dreaming-- questioning what is reality, this material and spirit world, etc...

Another tidbit that might be of interest: when I first arrived on this platform I found "Animals Dream" here to welcome me! A Steemian, by the name of LeoBliss, had posted my poem, here (four months before I arrived), just added a few pictures, and made $40 :)

Below, is the text of my poem as well as a video reading that I hope you might enjoy.

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What do Animals Dream?

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Do they dream of past lives and unlived dreams
unspeakably human or unimaginably bestial?

Do they struggle to catch in their slumber
what is too slippery for the fingers of day?

Are there subtle nocturnal intimations
to illuminate their undreaming hours?

Are they haunted by specters of regret
do they visit their dead in drowsy gratitude?

Or are they revisited by their crimes
transcribed in tantalizing hieroglyphs?

Do they retrace the outline of their wounds
or dream of transformation, instead?

Do they tug at obstinate knots
inassimilable longings and thwarted strivings?

Are there agitations, upheavals or mutinies
against their perceived selves or fate?

Are they free of strengths and weaknesses peculiar
to horse, deer, bird, goat, snake, lamb or lion?

Are they ever neither animal nor human
but creature and Being?

Do they have holy moments of understanding
deep in the seat of their entity?

Do they experience their existence more fully
relieved of the burden of wakefulness?

Do they suspect, with poets, that all we see or seem
is but a dream within a dream?

Or is it merely a small dying
a little taste of nothingness that gathers in their mouths?

© Yahia Lababidi

Here, is the first time I read "Animals Dream" in a public setting, when I was invited to Slovakia to participate in an International Poetry Festival: