Paragon and Pearl
Poet: Dr. Alireza Bemanian
|February 25, 2026
© www.bemanian.com
The treasure, paragon, and pearl
Treasures, paragons, and pearls, surround, enfold, and encircle,
to esteem, praise, and accolade, to yield, assent, and concede,
honors, awards, and trophies, entail, embroil, and encompass,
adorations, devotions, and warmth, traverse, cover, and surrender.
Chests and torsos, uncluttered and agape,
steps and strides, sturdy and robust,
ladders and runs soaring, rising and rocketing,
tears and snags, adjourn and recess,
arenas and stages, infinite and ceaseless.
Plethora, abundance, profusion and copiousness,
the colors’ spectrums, contrasts, distinctions, and divergences,
and the submissions, tenders, and assents, kindle and incite, promote and intensify.
The varieties, diversities, ranges and mixtures,
then, the commonalities, cohesions, and unities,
the urge and impulse, longing, yearning, and craving,
and the inclusive entity, the singular soul,
reveal and bare, depict and confess, unison and shares.
Tributes, compliments and praises, scatter, disperse and spread,
honors, homages, and adulations, reverberate, echo and ring,
contemplations, observations, and meditations, ascertain, determine, and distill.
Shadows and shades, merely to chase, demanding to share,
acquirements, procurements and attainments; or, to attribute, accredit and connect,
the era and epoch, bastions and turrets, all are rimmed, not girded, not girdled,
it is the entirety; rigorously, relentlessly, observant and vigilant,
to ensue, coagulate, and supervene, to attain and reach, to grasp and touch,
then, continuous and momentous booms and grows, propagations and proliferations.
The sceneries, backdrops, and outlooks, twinkles, sparkles, and flickers,
vistas, surroundings, and views, stretch, bounce, leap and jump,
outlooks, prospects, and projections, conglomerate, accumulate, and accrue,
surging, gushing, pitching and heaving obligations, gratefulness, and admirations,
flowers, florals, blooms and blossoms, to hold and learn,
the zest, relish and gusto, the verve’s motto and maxim, persist the vim to breathe.
Designate, delegate the soul and conscious,
Mitigate, assuage superciliousness and condescension,
celestial or cosmic, planetary and galactic,
variations are abundant, sorts, habits, and ranks are relentless,
embark and enter, join and connect, the territory of grace,
elegance, tolerance, to reprieve, rescue, to retrieve and liberate,
poise, clemency, and charm, attain, sail and soar,
voyages, passages, and crosses, trudge and traipse, trapse and tramp.
Noah’s Ark, the journey and excursion, the jaunt and outing,
spree and stroll, meet and match, muster and furnish,
stay on the urge, anchor on the shore, relish and adore,
the junctures and traverses, joins and connections, confluences and convergences,
the winds impel, storms to merge, clouds to influence.
The corner and center, cluster and pivot, to contain and hold, to bare and expose,
ark’s sides and edges, the borders and rims, and fringes and wings,
where the terrains, landscapes, sites and scenes, arenas and pitches,
reveal and expose, enunciate, articulate, the advocates to convey,
only the scouts, searchers to expose, render the roaming, convoys to roving.
your portrayals and depictions, the ark of admirations, adorations and ardors,
the sparks and torches, touches and traces,
the elixir, the potent allure, to explicate, elucidate, purify and refine,
passages and episodes, the substances, verves, vigor and vims,
and me, to build the ark, the chest and torso, we would know how to thrill.
Themes & Interpretations
The Lexical Fugue
Dr. Bemanian’s doublet-triplet architecture — the systematic clustering of near-synonyms around each concept — is not decorative abundance but a philosophical claim: that language in its singularity is structurally inadequate to lived experience. Like a pearl’s layers of nacre, each synonym adds a fresh angle until the truth crystallizes from the accumulated approach.
The Body as Ark
The poem’s most architecturally sophisticated move spans nine stanzas: the “chest and torso, uncluttered and agape” introduced in Stanza 2 as the prepared vessel returns in Stanza 11 as the material of the built ark. The body that opened in readiness becomes, through the poem’s labor, the constructed vessel of convergence — the human form as the primary site where all kinds gather.
Submission as Catalyst
Stanza 3’s claim — that submissions and assents “kindle and incite” — reverses the voluntarist assumption that energy flows from assertion. Dr. Bemanian aligns with the Sufi concept of fanā’, the Taoist wu wei, and Christian kenosis: the act of yielding creates the conditions for ignition. Passivity, rightly understood, is the most potent catalyst available.
The Singular Soul
Stanza 4’s dialectical structure — diversity, then unity, driven by longing — is the poem’s philosophical nucleus. The word “then” is decisive: unity is not found by avoiding variety but by moving through it entirely. The singular soul is “inclusive” — it retains rather than abolishes the diversity through which it was constituted.
Rimmed, Not Girded
Stanza 6 introduces a cosmological position of genuine originality: existence has defining edges (rimmed) but not interior constraints (girdled). The universe is bounded but internally free. This claims a middle ground between infinite chaos and deterministic enclosure, and provides the cosmological premise for the poem’s ethical argument against condescension.
Revelation at the Margins
Stanza 10’s argument — that the ark’s edges and fringes are where revelation is enunciated, and that only scouts and searchers can render the roaming — constitutes an implicit poetics. The poem identifies itself as margin-work: not authoritative proclamation from the center of tradition, but alert roving at the boundary where known and unknown meet and articulation becomes possible.