Stroll in a Particle
If you can find
a path into it
there is enough
space in this particle
to stroll for a lifetime.
Take My Hands
Take my two hands
make eight feet of them
give them to the spider
I soaked in hot water in
my kitchen sink.
I will hide my arms
in long sleeves, will
finish the last painting with
brush in my teeth
but take my two hands.
If the spider
curled up into silence, dies
she will weave her next web
in my soul
will travel with me
through all the lives
eighty four hundred thousand
and more
If you can find
a path into it
there is enough
space in this particle
to stroll for a lifetime.
Your Dream
If you have forgotten your dream
don’t worry
I saw it with my own eyes.
The figure that stood before you
with a bouquet of fresh roses was
not me
The arm that wrapped round your
waist tightly was not mine, nor the fingers
that stroked your hair.
The umbrella that suddenly escaped from
your hand and disappeared in the sky
was me
leaving you free
in the rain
to walk, laugh, run and slip
before you awake.
Kalli
Kalli followed me eight miles
to the market where
animals were traded like slaves.
Cows goats bullocks camels
Kalli was black beautiful and six
prime age for a water buffalo.
She was dry. Repelled bulls as if she had decided
never to go green.
Hard to afford, my father decided to sell her.
She obeyed as I led her by the steel chain,
one end in my hand the other round her neck.
I was fifteen.
Her nervousness was over
soon after we entered the market
where sellers occupied their given spaces
like matrimonials on a large weekly page.
Kalli sat down with no emotion in her eyes
like an ascetic close to nirvana.
I sat stood walked around like a neglected calf.
Nobody bought Kalli.
She followed me 8 miles back home
I wasn’t sure if Father was sad or glad
to see her back.
He just looked at her
like a family member
who had missed the train.
Mustard Flowers
If you see an old man
sitting alone at the bus stop
and wonder who he is I can tell you.
He is my father.
He is not waiting for a bus or a friend
nor is he taking a brief rest before
resuming his walk.
He doesn’t intend to shop in the
nearby stores either
he is just sitting there on the bench.
Occasionally he smiles and talks.
No one listens.
No body is interested.
And he doesn’t seem to care
if someone listens or not.
A stream of cars, buses, and people
flows on the road.
A river of images, metaphors and
similes flows through his head.
When everything stops
at the traffic lights it is midnight
back in his village. Morning starts
when lights turn green.
When someone honks his neighbor’s
dog barks.
When a yellow car passes by
a thousand mustard flowers
bloom in his head.
A tall man passes with his shadow
vanishing behind him. My father
thinks of Pauli who left his village
for Malaya and
never came back. A smile appears
on his lips and disappears.
When nothing interesting seems to
happen he starts talking again:
where were you born, and where
have you come?
Shall you ever go back?
It is all destiny, yes a play of
destiny, you see.
He muses
and nods his head:
and where will you die my dear?
The thought of death is most
interesting and lingers on
He stops talking and thinks of the
Fraser Street chapel where he
has attended many funerals:
He thinks about the black
and red decorations and
imagines himself resting peacefully,
a line of people
passing by looking at him
for the last time.
His eyes are lit. Perhaps
this is the image he enjoys most
before it is demolished
with the rude arrival of a bus.
Passengers get down and
walk away briskly like ants.
The bus leaves.
He looks
at the traffic again to see
if a yellow car is passing by.
A Little Extra Hug
If you hug a woman
a bit longer than she expected
you will be instantly rewarded
with scores of possibilities.
One of which being
that this will be your last hug
with that woman
or with any woman.
On the other hand,
I mean if you’re lucky,
she may turn into a grown-up child
looking silly
face covered with lilies
ready to fall in love, go further.
See how little it takes to experience
one of the myriad forms of love
if you know the amount
of that little extra hug.
The Moon Shall I call the moon female or male who pushes the cloud away and extends its hand quarter million miles to caress your body as you undress leaving the bedroom window undraped.
Once She Dreamed
Once she dreamed she was Mileva,
the long haired Serbian girl
who married Albert Einstein. She
quietly watched when Einstein twisted
the absolutely
flat space with his hands.
She watched
when Einstein broke the absolute
flow of time into pieces and
spun them around at different
speeds.
She was there when Einstein
reconstructed the shattered universe.
As he became greater and greater
he grew modest and tender.
When finally the world came to
touch his hands
Mileva smiled and left.
She said she still liked to live
in her own absolute space
and move at her own pace.
Once she dreamed she was
Francis Gilot.
the young woman who married
Pablo Picasso.
She saw Picasso with the tip of
his brush
tear apart the calm, surrounding
the objects on his canvas.
She saw faces turning into cubes
and cones.
When Picasso was engulfed
in cubes of fame Gilot left.
She said she wouldn’t become a cube.
Then she dreamed of Jeanny,
who married Karl Marx.
Jeanny read stories to her
hungry children
as Marx fed the hungry of the
world in his imagination.
As his beard curled more and more,
Jeanny saw Marx grow into a
prophet trying to unseat the lords.
When infuriated gods came
upon him Jeanny stood at the door,
wondering.
Last night she dreamt nothing.
The man she married
had quietly disappeared.
She says he was confused, depressed
and needed care.
A sad vacuum expanded in her
and burst.
Knock gently
Knock gently
when you reach the cottage
of my soul.
The door shall fling open
a flood of light shall
wash your tired feet.
Genetic Solitudes
Nothing is perfect
so there will be questions,
ever, he said.
Perfection is courage, she said.
If you accetpt it’s perfect, it is.
Even the crack in my heart
has followed a perfect path
leaving undisturbed
the quarks
spinning with all their degrees of freedom
in my genetic solitudes.
Labels
The baby
just born into this
world has been greeted
and well taken care of.
Already a variety of
labels have been
etched on him.
One for race.
One for color. One
for religion and maybe
one for a caste.
At the same time he
is told
you are born into a free world –
Congratulations!
The baby smiles and
accepts every thing in
good faith.
One day when he grows
into a boy and the boy
into man it will suddenly
dawn on him;
no body knows him
but the labels.
Those Times
Children will read
and wonder
what times on Earth
were those
when people sent
their love and
best wishes in
white and black
their yards grew
yellow red lilac
Every summer they
celebrated a new color
yet human face of a
different color
they barely tolerated
The Sphinx In Me It is our dining table. My little daughter pulls a face, says she wasn’t chosen to play fairy in Cinderella. I was better than Cindy, it is not fair she said. I gently move away the curl falling on her eyebrow and say, lose or win is the thing you have to learn your are a clever kid next time will be your turn The child forgets and goes to bed to walk on a lake full of stars. My eyes stay open. Slowly a sphinx rises inside me and throws the riddle: was it or wasn’t it the color of your child that robbed her of the chance to play the fairy? Knowing my fate if I fail I ponder over the talents of my daughter and the morals of her drama teacher. Could he be a racist? Meanwhile the monster inside me expands to full Giza size and demand an answer. With my soul squeezed to a dot and my heart flattened to the skin I get out of the bed and hurry to my basement library. I nervously examine the books to find the common roots of mankind, to attest we are all the same, to establish the school system is fair, to affirm it wasn’t the color. At times like these history books become most relevant You wonder why Indo-European is not taught in every school and you long to touch feet of Darwin. At times like these you fall in love with primates. I hurriedly pulled out most beautiful picture of a chimp to hang on my daughter’s wall. Genes of chimpanzee, I knew, travelled over and over million times to survive in me in my daughter, Cindy, in the drama teacher. The chimpanzee was the great Oedipus at whose feet I thought the sphinx will collapse Feeling light I turn the light off and turn back to climb the stairs The sphinx sat at the door laughing Size larger than his Giza avatar Blue Beaks There was no temple around and he didn't miss one Father simply bowed in the open and started working. Every year he sowed wheat in the dark brown soil of his fields Before he buried the first seed for his family he took a fistful scattered it and said grow for the birds. The second he scattered for the wild animals, a nd the third for the travelers who might pass by and want to nibble raw grains As he started pouring the seed behind the plowshare pulled by a pair of white oxen I walked beside him captivated by the opening and closing of the furrow. Present and past happening in the same instant. Later when he moved to the Fraser Valley farms of Western Canada he picked blueberry Sometimes he paused took a fistful of the fruit hurled in the air and uttered, this one for birds. A whole bunch of song birds ran riot in his head. Beaks blue with half eaten berries. Little Steps Over and over he heard it from his children that Earth is round But it never sank in For him the Earth was flat endless abundant benevolent and forgiving. Little doings of his hands and feet hardly mattered Until the day he stepped on a coiled snake The folk song dried on his lips He knew no mantra nor of any snake deity he could pray to Tied a piece of cloth round his leg and hurried back to the village before it was too late And as poison worked its way up his ankle it occurred to him: little steps on Earth matter Meditation With Feet Father meditated with feet in a pan of warm water before sleep every evening. He never expected my mother who brought him the water to kneel. Rather than wash in hurry he wanted his feet left alone let the dust particles loosen as he quietly thanked his feet, and a supreme being he vaguely believed in Dislodging particles spawned sensations he could experience no other way Not even from the touch of Mother's caring hands Slowly his feet calmed forgetting the bare-soled work in the rugged fields where I sometimes joined him to help end the day Meditation must start in the head said Hegel Head is where the mind is and mind is where impure spirit waits healing. Father had never heard of Hegel and his dialectics striving toward spiritual perfection Nor of guru Patanjali who said your body is your mind stretched into bone and flesh. It matters littlew here you start the meditation Father simply dipped his feet in warm water every evening. Playing with Big Numbers The human mind is essentially qualitative. As you know, we are easily excited by pinks and purples, triangles and circles and we endlessly argue over true and false, right and wrong. But quantitative analyses rarely touch our souls. Numbers were invented mainly by men to trick each other. I am almost certain women had nothing to do with them. They had more vital tasks, survival for example, at hand. But playing with big numbers could be interesting. In fact it could be really fun. Say if I were to sit on a gravel pit and count one billion pebbles non-stop it will take me some 14 years; or if I were to count what Africa owes to rich foreigners – some 200 billion dollars, it is impossible. I will have to be born 40 times and do nothing but keep counting 24 hours. Although things could be simpler on a smaller scale. Suppose as a result of the debt, five million children die every year , as in fact they do, and each dying child cries a minimum of 100 times a day there would be a trillion cries floating around in the atmosphere just over a period of five years. Remember a sound wave once generated never ceases to exist in one form or the other, and never escapes the atmosphere. Now one fine morning, even if one of these cries suddenly hits you, it will shatter your soul into a billion pieces. It will take 14 years to gather the pieces and put them back into one piece. On the other hand, may be all the trillion cries could hit your soul and nothing would happen. Coffee in A Clear Glass Mug It was the first time I made coffee in a clear glass mug. It was fun and a bargain. The gray coffee beans I bought were absolutely fresh, fragrant, and cheap. I poured the boiling water with all its bubbles, sounds, and hisses into the mug. No color yet. I put in a sugar cube and couldn't resist watching the cube slowly dissolve and turn into an irregular shape. Sweetness traveled to every molecule of water without muddying it, like an affectionate touch of a child's hand traveling to every corner of grandfather's soul. It was beautiful. I dropped in a few beans of roasted coffee. Light brown color emerged, turning slightly darker around the beans. To my delight a display of Grey shades began. The infinite variety of shades between black and white fascinated me. A stem of color rose in the center, branching irregularly here and there. There were shapes like flowers, and thick dots like coffee fruit. It was indeed a branch of Arabian coffee with flowers and seeds. Soon more color rose from the bottom, adding richness and expression to the plant. I added a few drops of rum at the side to make it a coffee royal. The plant trembled, and strangely enough it now looked like a human figure. Was it a coffee picker from Sri Lanka India or somewhere? It indeed was a coffee picker with reed thin legs, a loin cloth, no shirt and no waist. (The likes of which you see sometimes on tv to evoke sympathies in the would-be donors) I picked up the mug and had a small sip. Curiously enough the coffee picker was still there although slightly thinner. After another sip the figure was still recognizable. Shall I swallow it? Why not. I smiled. If those burger sellers can make baby faces on the burgers and lure my children to eat them, why not? Children, after all, are much more tender hearted. The thought suddenly made me upset. What are they doing to our children? Still engrossed in the baby faces and burgers I picked the mug to finish the remaining coffee. What am I doing to the coffee picker? The Maharishi And The Baby The maharishi whispers: the flesh is maya, temporal, the soul is eternal, the truth. The baby inside the starved mother insists it must come out the mother has to eat. The maharishi and the baby in the womb stare across into each other's eyes. Spanish Banks The grey sands invite me to follow the receding sea water to recognize a clam shell that could be the house where my ancestors began. I walk slowly with respect. Try A Red Hot Coal Try a red hot coal on your palm your hand may not burn The sun that rose faithfully for a billion years may not rise tomorrow The table in front of you stuck by the force of gravitation may fly to the ceiling any moment. Absurd? Maybe But my imagination has refused to circle around the sun forever.