poems

Don’t worry there’ll still be a lot of suffering For now you have the right to cling to the sleeve of someone’s blunt friendship To be happy is a duty which you neglect A careless user of time you send days like geese to the meadow Don’t worry you’ll die many times until you learn at the very end to love life

You keep waiting for something to happen, the thing that lifts you out of yourself,

catapults you into doing all the things you've put off the great things you're meant to do in your life,

but somehow never quite get to. You keep waiting for the planets to shift

the new moon to bring news, the universe to align, something to give.

Meanwhile, the pile of papers, the laundry, the dishes the job – it all stacks up while you keep hoping

for some miracle to blast down upon you, scattering the piles to the winds.

Sometimes you lie in bed, terrified of your life. Sometimes you laugh at the privilege of waking.

But all the while, life goes on in its messy way. And then you turn forty. Or fifty. Or sixty...

and some part of you realizes you are not alone and you find signs of this in the animal kingdom

when a snake sheds its skin its eyes glaze over, it slinks under a rock, not wanting to be touched,

and when caterpillar turns to butterfly if the pupa is brushed, it will die –

and when the bird taps its beak hungrily against the egg it's because the thing is too small, too small,

and it needs to break out. And midlife walks you into that wisdom

that this is what transformation looks like – the mess of it, the tapping at the walls of your life,

the yearning and writhing and pushing, until one day, one day

you emerge from the wreck embracing both the immense dawn

and the dusk of the body, glistening, beautiful

just as you are.

वृक्ष हों भले खड़े, हों घने, हों बड़े, एक पत्र छाँह भी मांग मत! मांग मत! मांग मत! अग्निपथ! अग्निपथ! अग्निपथ!

तू न थकेगा कभी, तू न थमेगा कभी, तू न मुड़ेगा कभी, कर शपथ! कर शपथ! कर शपथ! अग्निपथ! अग्निपथ! अग्निपथ!

यह महान दृश्य है, चल रहा मनुष्य है, अश्रु, स्वेद, रक्त से लथ-पथ, लथ-पथ, लथ-पथ, अग्निपथ! अग्निपथ! अग्निपथ!

What I like about the trees is how They do not talk about the failure of their parents And what I like about the grasses is that They are not grasses in recovery And what I like about the flowers is That they are not flowers in need of empowerment or validation. They sway Upon their thorny stems As if whatever was about to happen next tonight was sure to be completely interesting.

I know that dying is how we escape the rest of our lives. I think that trees send us a message: do not believe you are lucky. The skins of apples and the peeler will marry; it’s simply a question of when. Believe in mourning and carrion birds. Look how their fleshy treasures dissolve in the sun before their very eyes. To love something you must have considered what it means to do without. You must have thought about it—the coefficient of the body is another body—but do not forget that there are people who are willing to staple your palm to your chest. Know there are places it isn’t wise to go. Begin again if you must: there are ways to make up for what you have been before, the dust in the corners that collects you. Sympathy is overrated. Rethink how lack becomes everyone’s master, drives us into town and spends our money. Quiet: the trees are napping. Water meets itself again. We reach for the days that precede us and the world keeps us from knowing too much. The body loves music, the abandoned road of it; each day a peel lengthens in the shadow of blossoms, fabric weaves itself into light. Pay attention to the patterns. They repeat— terraces erode, groves lie fallow— order is cognate of joy.

If death is inevitable, if it is a sure thing that this face, these hands, this body that holds a lifetime of this living, will, someday, no longer be here, if you don’t get to take a single thing with you —

then —

why spend a moment more refusing, worrying about who might disapprove, measuring every move as if there is some fixed formula you must find? Why hold tight to anything?

Why not, instead, love every honeyed drop of yourself, why not leap into life—belly-laughing and light, light like the soft kiss of moonlight, light like the light that you are, have always been, will always be—

why not take this quickly passing day by the hand and dance like there’s no tomorrow? And if you’re too tired to dance, why not rest lightly here just as you are?