Aberjhani Quotes

Dare to love yourself as if you were a rainbow with gold at both ends.

The words ‘I Love You’ kill, and resurrect millions, in less than a second.

A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmare to the jeweled vision of a life started anew.

You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret— you return to the beauty you have always been.

Each star is a mirror reflecting the truth inside you.

This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls.

What a lover’s heart knows let no man’s brain dispute.

Un-winged and naked, sorrow surrenders its crown to a throne called grace.

Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.

Most people are slow to champion love because they fear the transformation it brings into their lives. And make no mistake about it: love does take over and transform the schemes and operations of our egos in a very mighty way.

Shine your soul with the same egoless humility as the rainbow and no matter where you go in this world or the next, love will find you, attend you, and bless you.

This is what our love is––a sacred pattern of unbroken unity sewn flawlessly invisible inside all other images, thoughts, smells, and sounds.

To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.

Oh what a wonderful soul so bright inside you. Got power to heal the sun’s broken heart, power to restore the moon’s vision too.

Compassion crowns the soul with its truest victory.

If I say your voice is an amber waterfall in which I yearn to burn each day, if you eat my mouth like a mystical rose with powers of healing and damnation, If I confess that your body is the only civilization I long to experience… would it mean that we are close to knowing something about love?

Even when muddy your wings sparkle bright wonders that heal broken worlds.

History dressed up in the glow of love’s kiss turned grief into beauty.

Then came the healing time, hearts started to shine, soul felt so fine, oh what a freeing time it was.

Love taught me to die with dignity that I might come forth anew in splendor. Born once of flesh, then again of fire, I was reborn a third time to the sound of my name humming haikus in heaven’s mouth.

Love, Mercy, and Grace, sisters all, attend your wounds of silence and hope.

Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.

Souls reconstructed with faith transform agony into peace.

In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.

Quote words that affirm all men and women are your brothers and sisters.

Everywhere we shine death and life burn into something new…

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace.

There is no envy, jealousy, or hatred between the different colors of the rainbow. And no fear either. Because each one exists to make the others’ love more beautiful.

Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.

Your pain is a school unto itself–– and your joy a lovely temple.

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.

In your hands winter is a book with cloud pages that snow pearls of love.

Hope drowned in shadows emerges fiercely splendid–– boldly angelic.

The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color. In short, the power of a certain kind of dream is such that death need not indicate finality at all but rather signify a metaphysical and metaphorical leap forward.

Now come the whispers bearing bouquets of moonbeams and sunlight tremblings.

First steps are always the hardest but until they are taken the notion of progress remains only a notion and not an achievement.

Diversity is an aspect of human existence that cannot be eradicated by terrorism or war or self-consuming hatred. It can only be conquered by recognizing and claiming the wealth of values it represents for all.

The same hot lightning that burns your blood with passion–– cools your fears with peace.

A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.

Beneath the armor of skin/and/bone/and/mind most of our colors are amazingly the same.

Know yourself fearlessly (even quietly) for all the things you are.

This world’s anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back.

With my ninth mind I resurrect my first and dance slow to the music of my soul made new.

Where humanity sowed faith, hope, and unity, joy’s garden blossomed.

In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.

Knowledge planted in truth grows in truth. Strength born of peace loses nothing to hate.

Just above our terror, the stars painted this story in perfect silver calligraphy. And our souls, too often abused by ignorance, covered our eyes with mercy.

What hell condemned, let heaven now heal.

Democracy is not simply a license to indulge individual whims and proclivities. It is also holding oneself accountable to some reasonable degree for the conditions of peace and chaos that impact the lives of those who inhabit one’s beloved extended community.

Dreams dress us carefully in the colors of power and faith.

Searching for a mind long lost I found it shaping colors and history near the cliffs of your heart.

Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings.

Feet sandaled with dreams tread paths of vision leading to wisdom’s sharp peaks.

If the idea of loving those whom you have been taught to recognize as your enemies is too overwhelming, consider more deeply the observation that we are all much more alike than we are unalike.

Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.

It becomes more and more difficult to avoid the idea of black men as subjects of not just racial profiling but of an insidious form of racial obliteration sanctioned by silence.

And now we step to the rhythm of miracles. --from The Light, That Never Dies

Making the choice to exercise compassion is an expression of Love for Humanity and Life itself.

Eastward and westward storms are breaking,--great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable.

This rose of pearl-coated infinity transforms the diseased slums of a broken heart into a palace made of psalms and gold.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. --as quoted in THE RIVER OF WINGED DREAMS

Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-clock labors of forgiveness. Without it, Love fails, Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails.

We ache with the yearning that turns half into whole and offer no excuses for the beauty of our souls.

Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.

In honor of Oprah Winfrey: Even greater than the ability to inspire others with hope is the power to motivate them to give as much to the lives of others as they would give to their own; and to empower them to confront the worst in themselves in order to discover and claim the best in themselves.

I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.

In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.

The Universe said, ‘Let me show your soul something beautiful.

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.

Stars ink your fingers with a lexicon of flame blazing rare knowledge.

With its leaves so rich and heavy with elation and its crimson face made brighter with visions of divinity the shadow of a certain rose looks just like an angel eating light.

There is within the human heart a quality of intelligence which has been known to surpass that attributed to the human mind.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was a manifestation of hope that humanity might one day get out of its own way by finding the courage to realize that love and nonviolence are not indicators of weakness but gifts of significant strength.

The job facing American voters… in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it, to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather than one of reactions based on unknowing fear.

Rainbows introduce us to reflections of different beautiful possibilities so we never forget that pain and grief are not the final options in life.

It can be difficult to speak truth to power. Circumstances, however, have made doing so increasingly necessary.

The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.

The gentle pulsing and flickering of stars and nebulae made a kind of music, a sweet easy mesh of whispered tones and sighing harmonies that held him in its force like the earth [holding] the moon.

Between death and hell a bridge shining silver wings offers his soul hope.

What can bombs know of the illuminated fields so golden with heaven in your heart’s sacred lands?

The glorification of hatred is predicated on a foundation of fear-induced ignorance venomous to haters and those they believe they hate.

We are not born to accommodate tyranny over our hearts, minds, bodies, or souls. We are here to confirm an abundance of love-inspired possibilities greater than such restrictions.

Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations. Tools such as compassion, trust, empathy, love, and ethical discernment are already in our possession. The next sensible step would be to use them.

History, too, has a penchant for giving birth to itself over and over again, and those whom it appoints agents of change and progress do not always accept their destinies willingly.

Our greatest power as nations and individuals is not the ability to employ assault weapons, suicide bombers, and drones to destroy each other. The greater more creative powers with which we may arm ourselves are grace and compassion sufficient enough to love and save each other.

When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.

The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.

The acknowledgement of a single possibility can change everything.

Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives.

A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable.

On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other's humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.

We are living in an era in which billions of people are grappling to promote communication, tolerance, and understanding over the more destructive forces of war, terrorism, and political chaos that have characterized the beginning of the 21st Century.

Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same... Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease.

Millions cheer the warrior spilling blood across the ring while the one who stands for peace is ridiculed and shamed. Must hearts forever suffer from ignorance and greed? Can bombs heal our souls or set our spirits free?

Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist. Pink dragonflies fall from the air and become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks. The rainbows that dangle upon this mist: shatter. Like the smile of a child separated from his mother’s milk for the very first time. --from poem Blood and Blossoms

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.

There is nothing sane, merciful, heroic, devout, redemptive, wise, holy, loving, peaceful, joyous, righteous, gracious, remotely spiritual, or worthy of praise where mass murder is concerned. We have been in this world long enough to know that by now and to understand that nonviolent conflict resolution informed by mutual compassion is the far better option.

The word 'survivor' carries a weight of remembrance that has broken the minds and bodies of more than a few men and women. It also contains a humbling light of recognition that compels many to do whatever they can to help reinforce the efforts of those who might be 'at risk' of not just giving up on their dreams, but of giving up on their continued existence.

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.

In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss.