SUNDAY POEM NO. YES. What gives you the right to grab what is not yours to take? You have grown large on piracy, swollen like a balloon on breath stolen from children who no longer sleep or fill their lungs because you have convinced them the air belongs to you; their...
FLIGHT TO FREEDOM My ancestors launched into the Arabian Sea in tiny coracles fragile as leaves to escape the jihad. Their country torched by Arab invaders, their people slaughtered in the name of Allah, they entrusted their bodies to the tides, sailed east to India;...
TENARAMENTE I stand at the boundary. On this side, familiar terrain. Hills like lyric waves brushed with sage, dew an aria on my tongue, golden wedge of light on my elbow. My arms know precisely my baby’s milky weight, his warm mouth loose against my breast, my...
SUNDAY POEM ELEGY When I bend and bind squeeze my soul into narrow shoes, deck it out in gaudy hues of other people’s clothing; when I alter my inherent shape, strut through attenuated alleyways of dialectic, I lose you, crumble. I know you are in me but I...
A CAPELLA My life is bread-making. Daily I work the dough. My hands blend, shape it into supple balls and then I wait for your sacrament of warm brown flour, sea-salt water, a sprinkled benediction, to expand in me, dissolving this mass becoming a fine leavening....
SUNDAY POEM BODH GAYA So this is where you sat, having vowed not to move until you’d grasped what you were looking for– the root of human suffering. To see things as they are. Girders of life, architecture of light underlying all creation. You met demons,...
