She hugged the tree with red body and red locks. A murder of crows kept making mad and loud sounds, filling the sky with black wings as dusk hour continued to put calves to sleep. Everyone stared at the autumnal sky with prayers on their tongues, with a memory stretching far back to the eyes of a ravine and the first ancestor. Does she need to write of this? Again? She wonders. This repetitive tale of rice recipes and departures. This puzzle of seeing the mystic again or not. This estranged desert of poetry. This empty thought disgusted over absence yet only of the absence. This crisis she will not speak of from the stomach. Not speak of from violent abandonment or intoxicated sunsets, not from lust or from identity. Not from pen. This time. This time it is brittle. Only of a crack.

Flute magician unknown. Other world unknown. Time and space unknown. Lady soaking the sun unknown. Sun unknown. Lady carrying the woods unknown. Thought and breath unknown. This realm of not knowing, this movement without ideas and concepts, this empty vessel devoid of definitions of potency, this pause, I have known before from the shade of the only flower tree in the desert of life. One drop of water without intention, without resistance, without even surrender. This drop of water from her palm to mine. She, the container and protector of music of the forest.

One day I will touch the stone in the same way I did back two thousand years back. No. Twelve thousand years back. Or Before. Before the thought for symbol. Rather. Before the thought. Vpaliwal

A native to southern tropical India grows now on an earth far far away. One wonders how were the hands that carried these roots across seven seas, that brought these blooms back to a native in a foreign land, to a migrant in a native land, in a foreign land. …

Catalogue Repacking colors and histories, looking for purses, giant purses to carry translations. Vp

Faith We look for faith/god because anything otherwise is a life so miserable and meaningless that there would be nothing left to pursue. If we look for faith/god, it is tainted with weakness and cowardice , irrationality, discarding science, pride of human logic. On both the sides there is doubt…

Volcano teach me the color and the thread of the world , teach me how to knit without a word, without a needle, like the first quilt woven by the first time we made fire, by the woman who knew her red rose. i am counting on your small hands. you wrapping the mother cloth around my body. you embroidering the bougainvilleas that just fit me right, find me right. you placing a mirror in front of me that reshapes my woman. i am following your footsteps. your smile. your vessel full of fire, of blood, of petals . i have rooted in your shade. i am the new volcano of red roses.

dreamy dreams living the dreams within dreams and somewhere in between the worlds of with and without languages i am woken up by a foreign man telling me in his mother’s voice ' it is summer here now' Vpaliwal

Morning Song Under the eye of the creator, every sin will pass, will melt, will merge into the morning air that carries the first bird song, to my ears that is god singing to me in the hour of first light that has managed to escape color, bridge and word, that is beyond eros and logos, beyond the war between digit and blood, beyond my muteness and empty surrender, to a quiet breeze of early summer and my urge to remember. vpaliwal