For You, To Your Star

I bring you songs

Long forgotten

That are sung by the leaves, 

the grass and shriveled tree

And by the dew and the dark

In stone-womb caves.

I bring you the rhythm of the earth

The slow, long boom 

That roars, echoes and whispers

from deep within, in my heart.

Of a hundred different suns,

(Some that awoke long before time was birthed,

and some that are tiny, gleaming jewels 

In the everlasting dream of the universe,)

I bring you sunsets

That meld into the horizon 

The colors of woven dream

And until the dying moments of twilight,

Last forever

I bring you tales and stories and myths

Of dead kings, lost Gods and magic

Tales as old as stone and wind and sea

Tales that time births, spins, sets aglow

And swallows in the end

Tales that, like the call of the waves

and the dance of day and night

return forevermore

I bring you silence

From the heart of sound

From the eternal moment between words

The instant before the twinkle

Of a smile in the eyes

I bring you all these

And I cast them up into the sky

To the star that bears your name

When night falls, slow and deep

Look to your star

And it will sing you forgotten songs

To the rhythm of all earths, all worlds

It will unfurl old yarns, and show glimpses

of the hues of sunsets 

That were, are and will be

In its silent, white heart

For Amma

Come to me, dear mother
Come, look into my heart
There is light moulded by sunsets
There is darkness, in part

Peep in, but be silent, still
For in it, I am alseep, aware
Of an orb of ever-new warmth
In the void that is full

Come to me, dear mother
Come, look into my dreams
You will find them scattered by your feet
A mosaic that's more than it seems

Tread softly and you shall feel
The song of the broken, and the bound
The ebbing light shall animate
The lost and the newfound

Come to me, dear mother
Come, look into my eyes
They mirror the light that birthed me
They hide stars, they bear skies

I am many, I am not one
I hold your faces, your stories, your dreams
I am a web bereft of seams
I am you, I am your son

The Beginning

The hymn pulsed

Through nothingness

In a single wave that became time,

That grew into distance, and shone as light eternal

Universes sparkled into being

In the nothingness

They swirled like dreams of motion

Like the dreams of dance

Deep within the womb

Of that nothingness

Everything was asleep

In that nothingness

And everything was alive

There was space, to be explored

And distances,

In that nothingness

There was sound

An immense, endless, silent roar

Of galaxies merging their spirals

In a frenzied dance, beautiful, perfect,

Ancient. It would be named chaos

In that nothingness

There was sound

The sound of light newborn, that burst into being

To shine eternally

Through the nothingness

It was dark, endlessly dark,

This nothingness

And it blazed with light

Light streaked through the nothingness

In an endless column

It engulfed the nothingness

Within its heart

And disappeared into nothingness

Light bloomed and withered

Light burst and bubbled

Light crackled and streamed

Light sparkled and shone

And then in the far distance

It twinkled

In the nothingness

Symphony

In a bed of silence

That is endlessly still

An infant sound bulbs

And a dying snowflake’s kiss

Breaks the surface and blooms

A single note

A single, windless chime;

At the moment of its birth

It ceases to be

The silent sea

Is still once more

But it dreams of that

Tiny swell

Endlessly

An infant sound bulbs

Dance

Dance, I dance, I dance

Watch me, watch me dance

I have sharpened my eyes

In the scythe of winds

And tell stories that lie

Upon the fabric of the sands

I can cast a mystic spell,

That is sweet wine and burning hell

With my sword-sharp gaze

And serpentine hands

Dance, I dance, I dance

Watch me, watch me dance

Watch my kohl-black eyes

And remember the velvet night

Watch the dance of colorless silk

That clothes me in the light

My lips,they course with a rare wine

They wait behind a veil

They wait for one who is worthy

To whom my dreams sail

Dance, I dance, I dance

Watch me, watch me dance

My touch can feed your aching soul

To the end of your mortal days

The high Sheikhs of a hundred lands seek

The oasis of my embrace

I am the wind of the west

I am the fire in the sand

The ice-sword of the naked moon

I am the spirit of this land

Dance, I dance, I dance

Watch me, watch me dance

The desert dances to my tune

The wind beats the rhythm of my feet

When I swirl by the fire

The night howls to man's desires

The skies grow purple, light

The night's end is nigh

When dawn tries to steal a kiss

I shall vanish into the night

Dance, I dance, I dance

Watch me, watch me dance

Dreams of Flight

1.

The wind buttresses my fingertips

They play a medley of notes in the air,

Tap at the invisible membrane of reality

In nonchalant joy

I look down and I cannot see the ground.

There are no brown-green crumbs

Scattered below.

No crooked silver lines,

Cutting impossibly straight

Man-made incisions

Into meaningless grammar.

All around me is blue.

And white.

Blue and white melded so inseparably

That I see them both as one.

Blue is white

White is blue.

All around me is emptiness.

Emptiness that is filled

With blue and white.

I look for the sun.

And then from below me,

In the far distance, to a side,

I see clouds.

I know I made them.

I made them so I could find the sun.

To find the sun I had to look for it.

To look for it, I had to hide it.

And so I made the clouds.

I looked for the sun I hid in the clouds

The clouds were pierced by yellow light

And my blue white sky was simple no more

It was indescribable. Inexplicable.

I strain harder, arch my neck forward

The wind lilts lost melodies in my ears

It carries whispers of other times

Other 'me's

I strain harder, arch my back and twist

I want to fly around the cloud

Look behind the cloud, my cloud

Find the sun. My sun.

I find the sun

And wake up the dawn

My dream ends

The wind dies

The sky fades

2.

Swirling through whorling grey cumulous clouds

Plunging into its dark dew-and-dust heart

I swallowed a pearl of white light that burst into

A thousand and eight threads of gossamer shards

I rose up through countless wayward kisses moist

Each kiss held one life fulfilled,death asleep coiled

I rose like a bead of blue lightning from a brow

That frowned dark and deep in unceasing pond'rous toil

The wind stole the kisses, it wiped them away

And wrapped me in shrouds of cold sky in their stead

It wailed and it laughed and it shuddered in dread

And it threw me into another bright day

The Wind Blows Eastward

I lie upon a changeless, yellow sea

Above me, is a fountain of hate

My lips, a parched well through which life runs free

For the wine of your love, the wait

My body is caked with despair's breath

A raiment suited to my plight

I wait amid sifting pores of death

Dear hope has not taken flight

I look to the tyrant, lord of endless thirst;

I am neither wanderer, nor sacrifice, nor feast

I am a mirage, not born of your heat

I shall shimmer away from your grasp

Though your malice dances underfoot

And even in the shade

Alive I shall be

Scorch me if you will

But hearken my tale

For in it lies the secret

To my tempered will...

In her eyes there is no oasis

But there is depth, there is mystery

And a shimmering image of me

She is not the fairest in the land

But she is of the earth

She has slept upon the sand

Her skin is not ivory, under the stars

But her embrace is a promise, unbreakable, warm

Her bosom is the desert's dream of wars

And of storm clouds taken form

'I will wait', she said

As the horizon swallowed me

The wind carried her whisper

Toward the blue seas

Her whisper binds my spirit

It is the call of the oud

Upon the velvet night

It tugs at the strands of my heart

And my solitude roars unraveled

Ten years I have walked

Served fortune like a slave

Now a shipwreck, then a war

Here an innocent life to save

But now I am done

I will wander no more

My longing sways in the twilight dust

The sand slumbers beneath

The wind now blows eastward

It wraps my face with rough, cool hands

My talon-brown eyes look towards

My home, a forgotten, dream-born land

And with the will of a galloping horde

Of black horses with star-sharp eyes

Those beat on the satin womb of the sands

The rhythm of a moon-white riq

I rise from the golden dust, a mystic

Of love that has too long been denied

Of oases that lost souls forever seek

Of music that is a thousand deserts wide

I walk to the hill that grows gently in the wind

I leave behind pain and wounds of memory

And they tumble as tiny avalanches, golden tears

Trickling towards a deepening valley in an endless sea

And dawn comes and kisses my unbelieving eyes

Guilty of having forgotten its caress, they cringe

And there in the far distance, at the fingertip of the skies

Is a solitary palm, blackened by a red disk, ascending

The wind blows eastward

I fall to my knees, my being takes wing

In the distance, the palm rises; a crooked shard,

A seif that pierces the emptiness within