I let go your hands knowing you are a quicksand of love. In another lifetime perhaps, where land steams with moisture and grasses sway all the way to horizon; now I have my eyes fixed on the path ahead, an unwavering light pointing the direction.

Years ago I wore a blouse embroidered with dreams that wove both of us in its warp and weft. Now with seams frayed and the design run dowdy, I have folded it away in an old box among camphor balls.

Night after night the sky is emptied of stars and moon, like a band of silk robe without shimmer or wrinkle. On such a night I realise I am emptied of love, overcome with the sickness of stumbling out of bed to scoop moonbeams in my palms.

Hollowing the walls that make my home, I build a scaffold to hold an empty space. Bricks crumble when intimacy pours through the hole like loosened cement. It’s time to leave the building that exists only in my heart and nowhere else.

November Poem A Day: Write a letting go poem

Fire breaks inside the forest, twigs crackle, insects singe and fall in balls of supplication.

Wisps of smoke rise from scorched branches, emptiness gives shape to space as silence to love.

I sink down, rake the soil, tug wasteful thoughts that run like weed; I ease knots of runners that hold my heart in pain.

With the leaves down, I can see deep into the woods, welcome the blue sky to write a poem on the cleared earth.

November Poem A Day: Poem written in response to the line “with the leaves down, I can see deep into the woods” from Dave Bonta’s Morning Porch entry.

the universal hanging-together of things,
their embeddedness in a universal matrix 
~ Koestler

I fly light for the first time in many months,
flow like the fragrance from the incense stick
that does not decide the path to take.

The shriveled seed absorbs moisture from the soil,
listens to the story written in its core that says
exact texture and taste of the fruit it would bear.

I place my ear close to the earth, hear pulsation
of my life in the fault lines, my heart beat registers
pangs of birth and templates the process of creation.

November Poem A Day

It is hard to see clouds erase the moon,
carry away hard edges across the sky;

I watch nights get pale and matted,
my terrace blurred and ashen.

Like moon he wanes, floating into dark night,
his voice blown by breeze from the sea.

Pebbles on sand are  petrified in silence,
my words scorched in grief when he’s gone.

Poem A Day: Write a  “When he’s gone…”  poem.

Photo courtesy: Denise Talley from EarthSky

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
~ Four Quartets, T S Eliot

If I were now to look at my past, is that not the present; if I hold to you from yesterday, don’t you become today?

In layers of memory I see you, the pigment of your skin and the scars in your knees from days we climbed the sun drenched hill.

I wheedle, dig into the dust heaped in the backyard, but images from sepia pictures from years ago have turned blur.

The sand dune is swept by the gust of wind to form a new landscape where the foliage has changed, the reflection I see in the lake is not yours.

November Poem A Day: Talk back to a dead poet