Chimera
/
my body absorbed pieces of her
as carefully and instinctively as my soul did
it’s as lovely as she was lovely
a conversation
/
i asked God for a sign --
something to assure me
that her spirit was not shoved
under the ground with her tiny body --
Pilgrimage
/
After my son died, as the cold grip of shock receded, the magnitude of this loss began to make itself understood. Ah, this right here is the what the poets and artists of the ages have been speaking of all this time. I wanted a quest, a battle to return order to my world. Where to go now, with this unbounded and hungry grief?
Read MoreThe wheel and the windmill
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From afar, and recently, on my trip to India, in person, my Hindu family, friends, neighbors, well-wishers from every sphere of my past, have been swearing on the karmic cycle, the soul, the wheel. Many of them have referred to Raahi as a “liberated soul,” one who has attained moksha or nirvana. I am grateful. It should be enough. The compassion, a heavy sigh, wordlessness. But few people stop at that.
Read MoreBirth, death, rebirth
/
We see it in the flowers, the leaves and the trees, in the plight of the caterpillar and beauty of the butterfly. The days of the week, the months, the years, the seasons; all one pattern that keeps swirling. As much as I don’t want the time to pass, it inevitably does. The more time passes, the further I am from that moment when I kissed her little head and tasted birth and death at the same time. I lived and died in that moment, along with her.
Read MoreThe dead are not under the earth
/
For the second year in a row, we move Joseph’s urn to the mantle, along with his birth announcement, and the photo of my pregnant belly days before he died (was dying even then?). But this, too, in its own way, feels empty. Why do I do this? I wonder. I do not believe that this night the veil between the worlds will open. I do not believe the dead will come back to visit us. I do not believe I will be reunited with my son.
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