Month: Mar 2023

in acres of Light

Once we begin to leave suspicions of each other, we lose feet & arms of war: we leave the womb of the foetus of hate; then it is not too late to

Pic Prompt : Hiatus

Conceive wings, in the blades of breakn’ shoulders:

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we leave the ashes of our dust of our rust; trading horizontal Hiatus for vertical miles

for breath we crave; you & I are geared for water, earth and skies:

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these Acres blaze the carnal eyes in the graves we wear if we bury Respect/Courtesy to each other.

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These are just syllables I try to bear ‘tween my keys; but often, when we willn’t mere see with physical sight;

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humans do what they do best when we dare rest in the Light.

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Written for Emma’s Wednesday Writing Prompt (once we begin). 

prompts 🥀🌿Once we begin 🥀🌿 & Moon washed weekly Prompt Hiatus

Sing, Soul
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The Pressure of Light

haibun

Jia’s lemon tea is red with leaf brew. It is like her : all pressured to be a safe mom. Her 2 year old isn’t speaking yet, she worries. (We meet for the first time through a mutual friend. The child has a face like a waiting dawn: fascinated I play with her in the floor mat).

Bini – the child loves Incy wincy spider whom she met at kindergarten today. We do a spider dance with our fingers; hers are tiny in mine. Dearest God, the child has light spilling off her ears! She likes Piggie snorts that she heard on kid TV. We do Piggie snorts and get the giggles. Bini starts speaking long sentences now- her words seem to jumble but she’s telling me about Jelly bears and cup cakes all at once with Incy Wincy wiggles, Piggie snorts and million syllables choreographed in toddler tumbles. Jia grins,

“More tea?” Her voice is happy silk; she has large black doe eyes that begin to dance at Bini dragging in a raggedy zebra with one eye and matted mane. More tea steams in gaudy mint: Jia’s piggy snorts are now beyond my decibels. I grab a sip and let the lemon in my throat. Laughter changes the pressure, like Light does. Joy weighs me out : its unruly garments tumbling us out to play ~ Jia looking like a child herself…

the pressure of light 
dances its brew in our skin 
dawn to dusk to dawn

At d’Verse, writers were prompted to compose haibun on the theme of ‘pressure’.

https://dversepoets.com/2023/03/27/haibun-monday-3-27-23-pressure/#comments

Breakfast in the dark

we are at a holiday farm few miles out of Bangalore. He is not at his best on trips: shoes are out of place for him, his fav sheet, his mug, and plate…uh uh. Change is necessary for Joh. It helps him adapt to the new. It gets him to make friends with difficulty; you can’t ask the nearby restaurant for mint chutney if they don’t have it. I mean, you can’t insist. At home, we kind of succumb. I melt 300% of the time.

“You, mom, can be ur son’s worst enemy!” A trainer once said to me. I was jumping off the edge of the earth with worry about our blind toddler back then. Our fabulous toddler. What did the man know about us? Great. Later when post seizure aggression hit us, and that too from the best highschooler on earth, we gagged.

This morning at breakfast Joh has this convo with friendly waiter, all the time addressing him a cordial, “Could I have some coffee please Sir?” (no they didnt have mint)

The man is middle aged with alcohol eyes. He can’t take his eyes off us: he wants to ask questions, he wants to stare but he’s too well mannered. We did a good tip, but even a double of that couldn’t have filled his need, whatever it was. The dear man’s red eyes follow us to the busy street outside. “Please don’t go drink,” I want to say, but Joh gives him, “Thank you. Bye Sir.”

J. has said at least 15 sirs by now.

Yeap. “From the mouth of babes…”

Back at the farm, everything feels good. Change will happen, this&that will happen. We shed skins and wings and pull out our talons, for new. Like the eagle, eh, yes. It’s that time.

Wait, rest, heal, trust the Healer

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Meanwhile, also on Instagram

stay blest!

iD🥀

Supernatural emotions

be arrested.

as a weaned child, rest your head on the beach between this & the eternal. measure how deep we go…

back to when we saw our first sun rise, a mother smile, a father breathe his last breath.

where does sadness exit, or soul. or my child’s tears when I touch him, or an old man’s tears, & a beggar’s invisibility:

am startled at What stares back; i got used to war,

Pic- Karsten Winegeart, unsplash

not this. this opposes black&white lines. This breathes between the lies. A Wound that heals. A piece of healing spit in my eye, a bloodied whisper in my riot: forgive. Forgive. Let go. Forget. Breathe. Exhale. Inhale. Be loved. Live, live, not carcasses in the wind –

but arrested by Rest. the greatest temptation is to stay unwanted, unloved. Ay, am staring hangjaw at sacred choreography, “… walk on water? Nay, dance, dance…”

Gopalpur on sea, East Coast India; searching for childhood footprints; change can be beautiful. pic taken by my sis Doc Li, 2023

Fantastically torn pages

We are each other’s story wrapped in tangles; edgeless momentoes of each other. We are fragments of stars and streams & oaks running ‘neath trees planted by torrents of living Waters...

pic : pickled stardust, unsplash

we are songs broken every day, as at dawn. We are wars. We are Seekers of Light, in the dark. Tossed by many storms, or the storm itself, we are lovers/ haters …

weavers of each other’s chapters: the fabric of skies and times,

we are choices, we choose: we write hues we may not know we know. We are fantastic/ fantastically torn. We are lovable, loved, bored, despised, cast out, downtrodden, we are more than we suspect: Stores, hoards …in the sands that mingle our beauty with the tidal currents that run our fingers. We know/ do not know the seabed of our blessings, we race eagles in the skies of our mind; we dive deep in the oceans of each day, we host the pearls we find, in each other’s eyes, or not; we are mysteries, we are

tribes of one blood, one breath, one chord pulsing us tight, one gravity: we leave the way we arrive, to territories we dare suspect, uh –

we know we are more than angels and the sun. We are the created: beyond visibility – blest to the toes of a soul / our soul, we may not have yet met: do we know we are blest, do we know…

the storey of a soul

🌿🌿🌿

Prompt FMF writers: Story

Bookie!

Thank you D’verse for provoking Prompt : Place & Space

Last week a local Book Store took me back to the first library I ever met. Dad insisted it wasn’t haunted, the local Doc said it was! I was five and deeply interested in everything, esp the smoking lady ghost they said visited the Bungalow’s oval mirror, next door.

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We were on an island where Dad worked. The Inspection Bungalow was a tiled few rooms with green faded windows, and attached library that cooed with pigeons in its shutters. Here I met the aroma of old pages running with silvery book worm.

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Most Sunday afternoons we visited the Library where dad got his PG Wodehouse & Perry Mason. Later in the noon he’d joyfully run us thru’ something new Jeeves just said. Ma would find her stash of back dated Good housekeeping magazines, and Georgette Heyer. She was this romantic, and loved reading out bits to me between blushes. She and dad were childhood sweethearts – still hopelessly in love with life, with the island we were on, with dangerous river crossings, with people of all types…..places, and oh books, even if it was the telephone directory:

books made one exist on a plateau with a globe full of footprints, heart prints..it made us a brotherhood of individuals getting to know one another. It was a priceless place, free of territorial rights and assoc wars ;

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later she unearthed “More than conquerors“ a novel off Romans 8:37, that steeled the way I looked at weakness: physical/emotional.

Yea, the Library, outdated as it is now?- will always resurrect that part of me that dares shadows and ghosts that boo. It tickles the ribs of shutters I create now and then and let’s me into the aroma of buried pages.

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Thank you D’verse for this Prompt Place & Space.

Meanwhile what I found in Blossom Book store here 😅

Tucked away in a shadow, 👆🏼 found this beauty (I have an older Ed., gifted to me by a visiting Belgian artist who lived in an underpass in Mumbai). She & husband had left home to be here in India and help the poor, the best they could. They later adopted twin girls from Kerala. Yeah, all this takes me back to roots that grow our pages, ya.

For https://dversepoets.com/

Airpoet Sunset (love that typo:)

My pics don’t half capture what we saw two evenings ago at our Kempegowda sky. With zero city silhouettes, no trees, just this blaze of light we’ve all seen before, but this one ruled!

It had been a long day, we were hoping for a spot of coffee & chat. But time runs: you don’t get to ask an airline to wait. ( The last Noel &I did that we kept AirIndia waiting a good five+ minutes; am not telling that story right now😧, they were polite and furious).

But heaven knows.

Heaven knows when a woman is about to have a meltdown. They know. My Noel is Mr. Tenderheart but practical. I’m saying “lookat that sunset“, he’s looking at Time. Where park this. How get to point B.

I’m thinking, does the guy love me? He’s sighing and grabbing steering wheel with eyes like a scared reindeer. Scared I’ll go do my thing. And ‘thing’ is my poetic self wanting to lie in the road and look at the sky. What he’d do is first check if that space is clean/ safe/legally clear…all that. Ofcourse. Is what great husbands do;

im just saying heaven knows how to sort us. They filled the skies with gold painted words I am learning to read.

At home last night we talked of how the skies are our keepers, how they shock us into their Point of View. At our Contrasts.

Have you had a very hot day, and got in the rain? And how that fell in your face like kisses from heaven; haven’t you too been hugged by an old person; they looked like your parent did, and you felt a piece of the Eternal holding you? Haven’t you too at least once, been smiled at by a total stranger at a bus stop, and felt the urge to smile back and it was indescribable friendship, random yea, but an ode to the Visible Unseen?

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.

— Albert Einstein

So I experienced renewed friendship with the sun : twas a glorious Stranger smiling at us, at a rushed Port, where there’s that thin fine line between here & eternity, between Time zones, latitudes, clouds, beneath / above. There are safety checks, safety measures. Waiting lounge. Departure, Arrival. Life in Transit. It is all of us, seen as with Bird’s eye. Everything suddenly miniscule. A paradigm shift of reference. One gets to congregate with all that blue. All that expanse. Acres of the heavens. Turbo speed is the closest we come to that kind of mileage. But deep within, we soar higher than we admit.

The nations are as a drop in the bucket, my Scriptures read. What is man …?the first Astronaut on moon quoted from the Psalms. I was a child, now am grown and the more I stare at life, the more am startled by beauty, by pain, by comfort and chaos, and by the rain that falls equally on us all, like the untouchable Light, the way It pulses at emotions, reaching in the iris of human fatigue, esp at dusk.

"Don't think about why you question, simply don't stop questioning. Don't worry about what you can't answer, and don't try to explain what you can't know. Curiosity is its own reason. Aren't you in awe when you contemplate the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure behind reality? And this is the miracle of the human mind - to use its constructions, concepts, and formulas as tools to explain what man sees, feels and touches. Try to comprehend a little more each day. Have holy curiosity." 
A.Einstein

We hurt my eyes

we, ripe with hunger

we bare stories of need in our skins ~

yesterday I saw a woman stooped over another in wheel chair & their million velvet wrinkles;

yesterday I saw a girl pouting for the camera of her young man in worn out sandals in a dusk burnt with fire.

We hurt my eyes with colors of Need: this Cucoon. It tears out the million keeling feet of our praying,

for wings.

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Pic: Europeana, Unsplash

“Rest”

the Whisperer whispers, and my storm runs out of itself

digital art RN

“Weeping may endure a night but Joy will blaze thru your morning,” ( Psalms scream via Time & all tempest) while

the Whisperer Himself sows Newness, like a Vineyard in my soul:

I go and branch like a branch; buds of healing break my wilderness. This cannot be. But it is.

The Whisper tends my dying graveyard like a Helper, a Server. Can all this be? But that’s the deadliest human storm :

Doubt.

Photograph : Don Ricardo, Unsplash

waiting in the Waiting

What lives with you

To Dance with the Fabulous Unseen

In response to the Five minute Friday’s “Choose“

Light. Shining. Via our son’s blindness? This is not what we yelled for at altars. This is not what we asked …

the Almighty, and when He never answered we sulked hard at the unanswered prayer.

This dawn am staring at how I’ve misunderstood the Act of not getting what I asked, and how it morphs me into a person one would never prescribe for their self… cuz the basic human request (esp this parent’s) is pretty self focused.

Watching him in the Light of a growing sun or dusk, is staring at his Joy not dependant on external conditions, as I am. He doesn’t know how blindness separates the seen from the Unseen.

What’s it like for him to never see my face, but touch me and experience my love for him? To never see the sun but feel its warmth in his skin. Am humbled this morning at the hugeness of Light,and how it can spill out of even my own response…re-writing my own thoughts that spiral down, and oh into the Unseen Dayspring in the cellars of inner blindness;

often I Choose to pursue sadness. But on days as these, the Light hits the shutters of my mind, leaving me no Choice but to dance with the fabulous All Mighty Light.

🌿🌻🌱

Vine Whisperer

I am naked, stripped

of the bark of Fear ~

then the Sacred Whisper draws me into a

Cluster of ripe Bloodtears-Crushed for Fragrance.

Vineyard of Healing. Oil.RN

‘Rise, Beloved’

Oil series for “Asha-journey of Hope”. RN

“Healed by a Wound”. Oil, RN

“Rest.” pastel. RN

waiting in the Waiting

(Vineyard Whisperer)

Intoxicated by the Light,

I cannot resist It resting in my throat,

waiting in the Waiting for another Sip.

This Vineyard Press is death- wrenching. We used to be here to quench a glass of thirst,

now It crushes into me, these Vineyard Whispers: like a Cup thirsting for me, to thirst for Its Quenching.

The Vineyard Keeper gives me Space in His Garden, a Lent, a Leaning in this season of my soul, with the Whisper.

Photographs Unsplash

Super Power (tears for Peace)

I’ve received hate, evil, disaster, discrimination, cruelty

but with Compassion … one is startled into a new order of things.

Call it Love, Grace, unmerited favor.… It breaks me out of old mental patterns into New.

It ruins Ruins, breathing Life into Carcasses of Joy.

Compassion weeps Fire in the ashes of our tears for Peace… Yea

we’ve eaten at Banquets of Hate but one tiny morsel of true Love, startles us forever

into a Dimension that can pull us out of traditional puppetry..

Can a tiny molecule of Care provoke Change ?

She was at least six months pregnant; her other child seen here, looked up at us with vacant eyes. The woman’s pale face brightened; in minutes every container of food we gave them was ripped open as they ate till their wrists were messy. I couldn’t sleep that night. The first time we saw this family living under a cart in a back lane at Shvaji nagar(busy market area locally), we gave them some food and money. It all seemed too little help for their cracked lips and skins shiny with too many hours in our Indian winter sun.

The next morning we contacted a renowned NGO that was willing to take them in, provided we got local police clearance, which we were willing to get for them. Five mins later, the NGO called to say, “We will get the family in our van ourselves.Legal clearance shouldn’t be a problem. There’s work, food, shelter, provided they are willing.”

Oh. Thoroughly happy with all this, we went back to family under cart in that back lane, with news of help. Their kid could get a life, the young mom could get maternity assistance, her husband – a job. All this with a legal nod. But uh uh. The man looked eager for what was being offered: he worked where he could – cleaning floors, sweeping the street early mornings, but the woman turned into steel. “We are fine.”

“Aren’t you scared of being in the open here, day and night? And in your condition? “

Her yellow eyes flattened. “No.” She said. Gone was the gaunt lost look. The woman looked formidable, a street creature with lower lip sass & arm on hip. We haggled over their safety and future;

their child crawled back under rusting cart which wasn’t theirs. The man gave me a sad smile, as his wife stuck her jaw out. “You don’t want help?” I asked, now embarrassed.

Another young man with them(you see his hand in the photograph), said, “Help.” Then he furthered that with asking for help for himself. Every time I spoke to this couple, the woman muttered at me, the husband looked sadder, and the neighbour asked help for himself.

He almost got to me, before a flower seller and another approached us with severe disapproval, (as the couple + kid disappeared).

“This boy is a local thief, he is mentally ill and will harass you all. “

The local “thief” was breaking my heart by now. Kitsy our daughter bought flowers from the vendor, beetroot for her dad’s salad (after Angioplasty, we are all eating better, every day is a beautiful reminder of miracles, all that…till we got here, to ShivajiMarket, for better veggies).

No, the NGO couldn’t place the boy- local authorities would need to clear him, they said in a quick text. How old was he, 20? His face was a mess of fear, desperation and aloneness. Grandma was all he had; he suffered from fits and was possibly a kleptomaniac. No, the NGO could not help him; this was a legal issue and I was advised to get home. We gave the boy some food and pocket money; his desperation seared thru me, as we got in an auto- rick back home.

Helpless-ness. What a word. What a world. All the need in me to help him didn’t seem to help. The flower & vegetable seller who knew this boy, kind of took care of him. They had even heard of the NGO that was willing to help the family (who disappeared as we spoke).

A strange kind of rejection this was turning into. Flower seller heard me out, and shook his head. “Who gets help like this?” He asked as he handed us a bouquet of lavender asters wrapped in newspaper. “….who refuses work these days? And who are you?”

Who was I ? With an unintelligible reply we had headed home after wading through street food and sellers of scarves, bright kurtas, junk jewelry, cane garden furniture and gaudy green guavas cut in with red chilly and salt.

The world is a strange place: the older I get the more I see it as a Union of Acceptance or Rejection – even from the most unlikely quarters. One sees the strangest Collabs of Innocence & Crime.

That young “thief” had the most innocent eyes I’ve seen in a bit. Local neighbors called him a chronic crook, oh not to be trusted anyplace. But – what if he had a base that could help him? “Help“, he’d said.

I don’t know.

Back home, we are not very strong ourselves, except deep within where I grow my vineyard of Prayer. Here one eats the salt of tears, of sensitivities sharpening by rejection, even from the most fragile sections of our society. Where have we gone wrong, so wrong that Independence is now settling in with lack of social security?

Oh the stories our lanes and lies tell. Some tell me there’s no use just praying. But every single time I meet my Maker, there’s a new face calling from yet another back lane. And they may run away from any kind of assistance; hmm, look it is scary to trust strangers,

and again,

can a tiny Molecule of Care provoke Change?

Maybe, yes. Even in our self.