While packing life away again I found this poem written by us pre-pandemic when Sherri and I met in a poetry workshop class in Los Angeles and collaborated on this piece . So strange to think right before the pandemic we were writing of the struggles and the possible answers for the years that were to follow. Poem starts with a beautiful puzzle of mud, navigates through the thickness of it and ends with recognition of the spark, all in one consciousness, not two separate poets and dreams.
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Since then the bizarreness of this world has continued to multiply with its wars and diseases. I like to not call it cruelty but the strangeness of this habitation. Many countries fell, many countries resisted, many players lost and disqualified…since then our polarization is so extremely split it seems fake…that there could be hope, still, almost.
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Unlike just a few years back now you can count countries you can travel to safely, every land in its own struggle , forced to face its shadows. In every world event there seems to be a new twisted shape emerging as if trying to reflect our distortion . Can we see? Can we see our disfigured bodies, our collapsing systems, the scream for renewal? *Only the individual can answer for the system.*
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The world of spirit asks me to sit in emptiness, see the delusion of grief and material. The dream must be lived though for transformation, it also says. So we face the riots and the separations and the rot and through it all we become something else, what and what for we don’t quite know yet and I would like to not conclude it as meaninglessness anymore but as a playground of birth of creatures that look and smell and breathe different. Here the right and the wrong and the good and the bad and the right and the left opposites don’t exist, only the flow of a strange dream and violet swims of strange fishes through it .
Vpaliwal
