Devotions
The cure to light is always more light.
We’ve forgotten our faces and see each other
only through the lemony light of dreams.
Our pastime is marrying the stickiness of skins to our fatigued spirits.
The cure to song is always more song.
The sound of water is not water—autumn chides us.
Water is but the cupped hands holding the warmth of moons.
The cure to bloom is always more bloom.
The death that spring sneakingly planted in our garden is blooming.
Let’s sing hymns praising the sturdy loveliness of fig trees.
The cure to blue is always more blue.
We are but the sound made by: a bell, a conch, a silver-lipped arrow.
The earth is but the sound a sea makes while it sleeps.
The cure to philandering moons is always mother earth.
We bow to the earth and the earth walks with her four legs
and moos in the praise of all that is.
Our bodies flow but the spirit is still.
The waves crash but the sea doesn’t blink.
Beyond the hills there’s another sea to swim in—
but not today.
• • •
Spring, Not Yet
Enough about ghosts. Enough about the other side.
Light arrives like a wave returns to the red arms of land.
We’ve been rained on. Now
it’s time to leave Rilke and read the skies.
The hymns are fattening again with sun
and darkness has kept its violin
back into the black case.
There’s still stillness:
but it’s unmarried to the perfect silk of death.
The last days of February are
but an occultation
to the disciples of a koel’s song.
The well is still there in the town
but whoever dies now
will die after knowing beauty.
If not the precision of loveliness,
then the green hands of water.
If not elegance,
then a calf’s half-opened eyes.
• • •
Pragya Vishnoi lives in India and her work has been published in Rattle Magazine and is forthcoming in the I-70 Review.