Chapter II — Dawns Horizons
Proclaimers and Announcers
Poet: Alireza Bemanian
|December 28, 2025
© www.bemanian.com
سرمهِ چشمِ سیاهش کوکبِ سِحرِ افق یکتا سپهرِ نقشِ چشم
— Chapter II epigraph © Dr. Alireza Bemanian, www.bemanian.com
Proclaimers and announcers,
representatives and messengers,
copious dispatches, abundant missives,
and a world of portents, clues, and hints.
The sky and distances, meadows and paddocks,
the separating lines, and conjoining horizons,
oceans and seas, and shallows and deep traces
are there to relish,
rebuke and snub, misguide, skirmish.
Or, a world of detachments, dispassion, and conceit,
to only foresee despair, ineptness to conceal.
Stare, glare and gape, narrate, relate and convey,
proportions, immensities and extents;
advocates and exhibitors of existence,
harbingers of vibe, sense and vivacity,
resonators of diligence, resolve and rigidity,
are there, to join, unify, and enlist.
Inhalations, fortifications, and shields,
the sky, rain, and elixirs, reciprocate and reveal,
the shared assets, allotted deeds, the slices and bits,
do awes and esteems, pertain, recollect and perceive.
Exposure of the roses, blossoms and rosettes,
pursue the harmony, tranquility and serenity
to tarnish delusions, fallacies to curtail;
adorn and portend, titivate and garnish.
Endure, observe, and pose,
Profess, allow, and perceive,
is it the whirling world gyrating to congeal,
or, panoramas, the scenes and prospects, do merge and seal.
The themes and bases, spread the judgements,
puzzles, posers, and the dancing riddles,
the ballets bundle the bounding,
the whole tally conjunctions.
Breezes, winds, prevail and ordain.
The dawns, advents, and genres,
influences and potencies, the hallmarks and overtures,
collectively pledge, to meet, ascertain and conceive.
Alireza Bemanian • December 2025
© www.bemanian.com
Themes & Interpretations
The World as Herald
The poem’s central ontological claim: the world is constituted by proclaimers and announcers. Sky, distances, meadows, oceans — all are “advocates and exhibitors of existence.” To exist in this world is to inhabit a total communicative environment. Every feature of the landscape is not merely a scene but a herald, a representative, a messenger dispatching its own nature continuously.
Ambivalence of Proclamation
The heralds of the world are not moral guarantors: they are “there to relish, / rebuke and snub, misguide, skirmish.” Five verbs spanning pleasure to minor combat. The proclaiming world can mislead as readily as it illuminates — the missive can deceive, the harbinger can be false. This structural ambivalence requires active discernment from the receiver, not passive deference.
“Ineptness to Conceal”
Stanza 3’s two-line hinge diagnoses detachment, dispassion, and conceit as failure rather than philosophical achievement. In a world constituted by proclamation, to withdraw is not equanimity but incapacity — the concealment of one’s ineptness behind the posture of disengagement. The compressed stanza enacts its own subject: the airless condition of the self that refuses what the world is continuously offering.
“Titivate and Garnish”
“Adorn and portend, titivate and garnish” — “titivate” (British colloquial: to make small cosmetic improvements to one’s appearance) placed between “portend” and “garnish” is the poem’s most tonally audacious moment. The world that announces cosmic events also titivates its surface, straightens its collar before the proclamation. Grand heralding and small self-preparation are inseparable acts.
“The Ballets Bundle the Bounding”
Ballet returns from poem II.2’s “arduous, onerous, and grueling ballets of thoughts.” Here the ballets act rather than describe: they bundle the bounding — they organize energetic excess into structured form. The triple b-alliteration (ballets, bundle, bounding) performs its own claim. Proclamation at its fullest is not mere broadcasting but the disciplined art of containing what would otherwise scatter.
The Whirling Question
“Is it the whirling world gyrating to congeal, / or, panoramas, the scenes and prospects, do merge and seal” — two genuine cosmological endpoints held open. Congealing: motion arriving at frozen fixity. Merging-and-sealing: the vistas flowing into wholeness. The poem refuses to resolve this uncertainty. The proclaimers operate within a cosmos whose ultimate nature — fixity or integration — is authentically undecided.