These Tiny Devotions
A poem by Tadiya dasi.
Life.
I don’t know
exactly, how to do it;
have it.
be (in) it.
I have it.
A family unit.
Parents.
Sisters and brothers.
Yet I carve out my aching heart
from my lungs
and breathe fire.
Is it me,
or the ground beneath me, that cracks?
I think velocity.
the speed it takes
from an object (me)
to fall.
How
I seem
to fall
on continuum.
from the earth.
to the earth.
while
other
lives happen in between.
What happened to mine?
Listen.
My voice is hoarse again,
from sadness.
Still
Words pour out;
These tiny devotions.
I am a flame
flickering;
my darkness is a mellow
all encompassing
melodic
I ruin it only
by not allowing it.
I swallow the light.
bask in yours.
that is how i stay alive;
I borrow yours.
I could tell them
how your breath is in my thoughts
like wind; directing.
how my prayers are beads,
worn out; knuckled out like duty.
how my heart exists on a sole
sandy path
somewhere in California.
how you
dry me out.
how my mother tongue has been replaced.
How
I know
none of my
ancestors. Their rituals.
My first birth gave me a broken voice;
this is a forever-kind-of sorrow.
But I allowed you
to break my language:
to strip it
of all its human warmth.
this is forever
the
bitterness in my throat.
How you ravage me.
how your
wreckage
is in the hollow of my
cupped hands.
that carry nothing.
not even me.
tell me
what can I give from emptiness?
I carry you.
Myself.
This load of doubts.
Bucketfuls of remorse.
Tell me again
how
beauty
runs through all things;
like a pearl.
how you breathe me.
So
i can find it.
My life.
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