Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Lighting a Candle in St. Germain des Prés

                                            -for Zeynep

I.

To pray alone
          is not a plea for favors
     or magic
          although miracles are always welcome

To light a candle
          is a reminder to God and gods
     not to be forgetful about pain

And it is a message
          to myself that caring
     can often heal at great distances
          and is never unwelcome

And if the flight of a butterfly
          in the distant hills of Terrapolis
     can make flowers bloom in Istanbul

Then surely my candle in Paris 
          could more easily change
     the wind currents that blow
          through your distant mind and heart

II.

Prayer mystifies, prayer brightens
     as the candle's gentle light
          mystifies and brightens

It is a refusal to lose focus
It is the charms cast by soft light

It is a bracelet of love that never binds
It is more than a bracelet of love
It is a reverence for boundaries
It is a disregard of boundaries
It is seeing and feeling beyond horizons
It is nuns huddled in half light
It is remembering the unseen
It is adoring the unseen
It is an expensive gift of hope
It is a flock of geese in flight at dusk
It is coming home alone in darkness
It is a recovery of closeness
It is an overcoming of mere distance
It is calling for help silently fervently
It is above all else a silent bonding

Mary and Jesus

How many time have I seen them together
Yet mostly near birth or just after death
Neglecting the hard passage through time
From infant Jesus to the cross is too quick
For my modern eye to see
And rarely caught the painter's fancy
But holding the holy infant
Became back then the artist's signature of belief
As holding the limp sacred body
Became the artist's inscription of faith

This holy mother alone for centuries
Abandoned in hard times by Joseph
Or was it the other way around
Abandoned also by her only son
Or was it the other way around
Her son who finds the world to lose it
And is found again and mortally spurned
And found yet again to be so well remembered.

On Hearing of the Capture 
of Saddam Hussein in Paris

And so the demon of Iraq is ours
Ours to punish and ours to decide
Ours to devour and ours to display
The vile killer lifted from his spider hole
To become a TV image a trophy of war
And then to die in our liberating arms
As we sip from this poisoned chalice of revenge
That would sicken the most hardened soul
The hunter who loves the hunt
And haunts the hunted is not my god
I feel no joy in Paris on this day
Although the demon of Iraq is ours

I dare not share these musings
Even here in neutral Paris 
I feel distant from these tribal passions
Perhaps lost in clouds of disbelief
And yet I too would cheer and dance
If our demon is ever pulled from his spider hole
And made to kneel while we recite his crimes.

Dreaming-II

Do I dream too much 
Do I see too little
Do I dream too little
Do I see too much

This world of ours
So full of death
So empty of spirit
     The clowns are weeping
     as laughter seems morbid
     on these killing fields

Eerie silences fill the mystified air 
     with lies spoken and unspoken
     amid cultures of evasion

The bleeding goes on and on 
     as bodies discreetly pile up
     unseen by our vacant eyes

There are bittersweet words for our heroes
"I prefer life to medals of dishonor"
     a soldier numbed by memories
     a dreamer among warriors

Do I think too little
Do I know too much
Do I think too much
Do I know too little

I walk past gardens of flaming flowers dazed
     somehow hoping for rainbows
     still obsessed by horizons

A litany of hopeless hopes
     is the best forgetting
     in this autumn of the world

Do I pray too little
Do I hope too much
Do I pray too much
Do I hope too little

Richard A. Falk received his law degree from Yale Law School, and a J.S.D. degree from Harvard Law School. Between 1955 and 1961 he taught at the College of Law at Ohio State University and from 1961 to 2001 was on the faculty at Princeton University. He was appointed the Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice at Princeton in 1965. In 2002 he became Visiting Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Over the years he has appeared in many cases as an expert witness on international law issues. His most recent books include: The Declining World Order: America's Imperial Geopolitics (Routledge, 2004), The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports U.S. Foreign Policy (Verso, 2004)(with Howard Friel), The Great Terror War (Olive Branch Press, 2003), Human Rights Horizons: The Pursuit of Justice in a Globalizing World (Routledge, 2001), and Law in an Emerging Global Village: A Post-Westphalian Perspective (Transnational Publishers, 1999).