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Poetry in Auroville: Lloyd Hofman
Lloyd Hofman of the Netherlands came to live in Auroville in 1988, at the age of 36. In his first nine years in Auroville he was a forest watchman at Fertile, later combining forest attendance with library work while living at Gaya community. He moved to Creativity in 2002 and worked as an editor of prose and poetry, from his writers workshop Avipro.
He studied 'I Ching' and poetry (in English and Spanish) for twenty years, brought out the book of poems "But for the Breeze" and “Between Seasons” and was finalizing a book on the I Ching. In 2007 he co-edited "Devotion", a large anthology of spiritual poems. He was also a photographer and gave a few exhibitions in Amsterdam and other major cities.
Lloyd quietly departed on 15th May 2010, at the Auroville Health Centre, at the age of 58.
"But for the Breeze", 1994
http://www.auroville.org/contents/3724
"Between Seasons", 2008
http://www.auroville.org/contents/3723
"Devotion: An Anthology of Spiritual Poems", 2007 - Co-editor
http://www.auroville.org/contents/3773
Some Poems...
Lazy afternoon
Suspending belief
my thoughts and deeds
flutter out of me
into a wider span
of mind's migrations.
I watch the rising,
vital hungers
and their deadline,
a cloudy turbulence
free of being me.
Where wood resounds
with hammer blows,
offices hum
and passing cars
have destinations.
Quiet
(I)
Forgetful
of my borrowed time
and at rest
with missing answers
nameless but
true as the gift
of a morning
for a first day.
Still …
Where, maker
of breezes that flow
as breezes do,
where to meet you?
(II)
Sometimes I move beyond
the fringes of my thoughts
and artificial space
at ease in not knowing,
not seeing myself, and
at one with the outcome.
Cabin
(I)
In his cabin he thinks
of his views on the world
as having seen too much
with memories turning
to fantasies and tales
on his forgotten selves.
He knows that he lives
at an end where affairs
will unwind without him
free in homelessness
where a soul inhabits
the world as one room.
(II)
When on arriving
there is still a sense
of transformation
a rush of changes
half understood
still moving in the blood
a different world
found in a pattern
of old ones made new.
