“If there is a knower of tongues here, fetch him;
There is a stranger in the city
And he has many things to say.”
[Mirza Asad Ullah Khan Ghalib]
He will say what he has to, of course,
but to learn to listen, that is the greatest trial and joy;
To know of love, that insidious stranger,
that magnificent word, to fall
willfully and with the grace
that love demands, and the surrender.
For on the other side
of reason and rationality
I often forget something important.
With all of my logic, my caution,
my 'self-awareness', my exhaustion;
Sometimes I still wade through my days
and float through my nights, and emerge,
dry driftwood,
untouched by the the ocean, caressed by no wind,
tossed wildly in ecstasy by no frothing waves.
I am, but a stiff white skeleton of what I might have been.
Safe, safe but with no grace. I learnt how to live
once, under the bowers of towering trees,
but in the callousness of rubble and city lights, I forget.
There is no grace
in the passing of time without the giving of myself, broken as I might be,
indiscriminately. There is no grace
in holding back, deliberating,
forgetting where a day began and where it is ending.
There is no joy in living this life if I live it hollow,
if the echoes ring back to me in my fragile dreams.
I worried I would forget
the massive vulnerability
I hold in myself, so carefully.
But it is a joy
to know that there is still grace.
There is grace in the newness you open within me.
Grace in the delicate fumbles in the dark,
in the wonderful awkwardness of
freshly born lovers. There is grace
in the notes of your classical guitar,
resting on my skin like gentle drops of dew.
There is a stranger in my city,
and I wish to know him. I will learn the tongues
and wait in the rain in a blue dress.
I will open myself to the skies, and my skin
won't be burned or numb. I want to feel the drizzle
slide off my arms, and I want to feel a thunderstorm
beating in on my worn-out door, if it has to.
I want to hold every moment
in the hollows of my hands,
and partake of it well and deeply.
And perhaps when it passes
I will let myself pick up the glass fragments
of once-seamless hours, and hold them up to the light;
watch the sun break through the dust, and smile
at the grace of life.