Into the Mystic

The star is bigger, warmer and brighter, and we are in yet another new place, or is it an old one? The place where all of this started, and I found so many beginnings. 

We are a new place, and she is a new star. The world opens again. 

this whole blog thing

Taking another sip of tea and listening to She Keeps Bees, I can say the following as a recap.

It's been about 6 or 7 years since I started this blog. I was pretty religious about it when I started and while I was at Harvard but since then I have had a few lapses in the regularity.

Really there are a few reasons: This started off as a kind of outlet for poetry and also a place to air my response papers and get some intellectual feedback as well as having a gripe about what's happening in the world and my world, mainly my love life.

Now my love life has been up and down like a fucking roller coaster since the time I finished Harvard, but other things changed: working took up a lot of my brain, though I still managed to write a little poetry in here, especially trying out the Ghazal form, which I highly recommend for poets who want to stretch themselves a bit.

Obviously the intellectual stuff went for a bit of a nose-dive: I didn't get stupid or anything, but I wasn't reading nearly so much theory...

I became a Sikh about 2 1/2 years ago, which has been hugely helpful and a really good process.

Now, however, in case anybody's listening, I'm starting my PhD at Oxford University after an absence from academia of about 5 years. AND if that weren't daunting enough, I'm facing my 30th birthday in just a few days. Actually that doesn't bother me much at all frankly. At least not consciously.

And I also got married this year to a lovely man. Which is causing me both joy and pain, I must admit. Mostly joy.

So that's where things stand. I'm going to be checking in more, and like before it will be a combination of intellectual spewings, poetry and some intimate details that you didn't really want to know. I still have my food blog, Les Madeleines du Memoir. I also have a new blog about Contemporary Sikh Identity which is basically a platform for a project I'm doing with a few friends.

There's the trouble though, I guess, about getting a little older, working and constructing your identity...You have to be careful what you say.

I feel like Allen Ginsberg when I say: I want to be frank with you but, America, I don't know how. (that goes for the UK and any other country too). We'll see what I can come up with.

Love,

SR65

Ghazal of Seven Lifetimes

(for Tarun and Swaroopa on their Wedding Day)

Your steps now, toe by toe, in this spiral called love
Are light but sure. Your feet face forward, your shadow stained the colour of love.
Now hand in hand, holding tight to the newness of each other you
Are undiscovered countries, frontier land lush jungles of love.

What will you find?

Mountains, rivers, valleys, caves and peaks of love,
White water and black. The stirrings of wings, birds of love
Their nests the breadth of your chest. Your heart is pure: do not
Be nervous now, because today begins an adventure like no other.

Now begins your life of love: a sutra of pain and pleasure.

You should know: lovers live in each other, their kingdom Love -
I have seen the roses grow wild by its roadside. In love,
They shine with heat and glory; their fragrance, so sweet and light
Saturates the air as incense fills a shaft of sun. Rain upon them love.

Remember: the house of the world is built of love
Within its walls we bless, fret, sigh and whisper love
We sit by its hearth and open its windows. Beware:
You sow your soul, when your feet stir the alta at its threshold.

What shall you reap?

You can but reap this truth:
Two souls made one cannot be separated
As love from love, cannot be divided,
nor counted, nor weighed;
As you cannot be without yourself.

See that: You are your own future in love.
What you build is yours in the province of Love.
Let it be strong and selfless, passionate and yielding
Let it be full to overflowing, green and vibrant as a grove.

Says the Saint, “Who will unite me with my love?
To him I will give all I own, my very head in this game of love.”
When you hold within your arms the soft skin of your beloved
You hold the world, you hold the Almighty, all pervading, all love.

So hold carefully, and tight. And be blessed in this lifetime, and the next.

The Burning Poem of Intention: Your Plays

(my first Sikhi poem...draft. Hope I don't say anything offensive.)

*********************************

The Burning Poem of Intention: Your Plays

 

My mind has been mortgaged to illusions:

I have put chandeliers into a borrowed house of straw.

A hearth in a house of ice.

 

Blown with flies and dust. I decorate myself with string, with blood, with death itself.

 

In this dark there is a rainbow reflected. You

Like a diamond gleam in everything, even the sparkle

Of the ice as it melts, the honeyed straw. 

 

They will fall away.

 

But you… are the sweetest of scents. You permeate

every thing every space every living breath every inter-space

with grace.

 

Originating everywhere, never fading, constant, clean. Perfect.

 

Though it sweeps under leaves and over roofs, into lungs and cells, out noses.

Though it folds itself between the pages of books, and mixes with the mortar of bricks.

Though it makes up the blinding lights of stars themselves, we will not smell it.

 

We ignore this beauty.

 

We can see nothing, unless we breathe deep the depths of you.

 

 

Your plays have, in this way, bewitched me.

 

 

I will set this house on fire and step out of its door with love for you.

My bare soul feet clean of the melting “I”.

 

It will fall away.

 

The companion that grew with me, inside and without me,

You, are tear and smile. Foolishly,

I had thought you were far away.

 

This partner, this friend that consumes me with a holy fire

My soul burned towards the stars.

And who makes it cool with no other desire.

 

You who could drop a match into my very being, snuff and strangle.

You who enter into the deepest recesses of my body without a sound.

You who put me in motion with the grace of your natural moves.

 

Your plays have, in this way, bewitched me.

 

I see you sometimes:

 

You in the cell of a leaf,

in the atom swinging,

in the cold breeze of a derelict room,

in a warm heartbeat,

in a rug on the floor,

a sudden storm,

the sky at night,

the everything.

 

We cannot describe the gifts.

How then the giver? And

How the giver who is:             giver,                         gift             &            hand held out.

 

Every clotted sigh,

every line of every letter on this page,

my fingers, my thoughts: this is all you.

 

Your plays have, in this way, bewitched me.

 

Lover who makes me, sister who breaks me: I am lost.

 

I know that I shall be called into the dark, kicking over a lamp.

 

I will set this house on fire and step out of its door with love for you.

My bare soul feet clean of the weary, melting “I”.

 

Cinders and ash will fly up, blue and final

 

With nothing

 

The fire will light my road to you.

 

Ghazal 4 (stone radif, for Hitesh)

We sharpen, we wane, we pound and crush, we do not move to stand alone as stone

We are altars and baths, garlanded, smoothed, worn with blood, milk and love as stone.

 

In this house so solid and so cool I listen to songs of solitude but you

Lean against the wall, collapsing like a reggae king: rock-stone.

 

These are the built foundations of Jah-law and Jah-love.

Our kisses set lips as lime between the stones of this fortress.

 

Your body, smooth and tight, a seam of gold in a dark, hot mine-

A candle set inside a fist of salt, glowing through that solid stone.

 

You light my way: your feet cast golden angles like an open door. We lean in, become The acute kissed source of talk-talent, as echoes fly like prayers inside of our stone-love.

 

But because the firmament is not firm, and the heavens are not fixed, the meaning

Sun will glint between us on a given day when, breath-stirred, the stars align to stone.

 

We are eternal, yet we wear to dust under the soft touch of children. Our forms reborn, our memories burnished away. We yield to innocence, for time will also visit stone.

 

Love changes form, as waves carve caves from solid rock and sculpted forms run smooth

But light from light refracts, gold cleaved from gold is gold alone, and stone is always stone.

Ghazal #3, 2nd draft with change.

There we were, floating on the sea, the tide scrubbing us clean
Of all the loneliness that has now rested back on me, like a crow.

Now I feel dirty, distant from the innocence of a blackboard, unused,
That cold slate taste of chalk we had as kids licking beach stones clean.

But I think of the purity of your sweat on me like rain, the whiteness
Of ancient trees. Some things must be worn into beauty, corrupted clean.

People fold to profane rhythms of the earth, but God shapes this:
We are ambergris upon the water, with time the foul can be fragrant.

The Ghazal opens a pure passion. Numb, lovely, beyond love and hate. A quiet
Sunlit courtyard entered after a long journey, these final steps swept clean.

You stand up naked, brown back shining in the afternoon light, leave me lain
Glistening under the fan. When you’ve wet your black hair who will be clean?

Ghazal #3 (draft)

There we were, floating on the sea, the tide scrubbing us clean
Of all the loneliness that has now rested back on me, like a crow.

Now I feel dirty, distant from the innocence of a blackboard, unused,
That cold slate taste of chalk we had as kids licking beach stones clean.

But I think of the purity of your sweat on me like rain, the whiteness
Of ancient trees. Some things must be worn into beauty, corrupted clean.

People fold to profane rhythms of the earth, but God shapes this:
We are ambergris upon the water, with time the foul can be fragrant.

You stand up naked, brown back shining in the afternoon light, leave me lain
Glistening under the fan. When you’ve wet your black hair who will be clean?