On Earth, in my bedroom, on the cusp of death,
An inscrutable, rectangular
black stone
appeared in front of me,
Its shadows seeping into my soul.
It struck me in my dream,
And sang to my lungs
A hymn of elegy and unanswered questions––
Flinging me beyond my dying body
Into a different spacetime in God’s sensorium.
The mollusk of spacetime spun me endlessly,
its spiraling arms unraveling the weight of the world––
the child’s swollen, bloodshot eyes glittering through her
shattered house and her parents’ bombed corpses;
The hospital filled with whispered last breaths and unuttered goodbyes;
The empty wooden chair, with wrinkles of sealed memories, at dinner table––
I saw how we bury the nameless with the names we love.
We are all bewildered.
Bewildered by the graves we dig,
Bewildered by the silence that follows,
Bewildered by the eventual vagrancy of our own soul,
when no one stops to ask,
Why?
Around me, matters imploded,
plunging into bottomless voids
The magic of time slowed near planets,
as if honoring the dead;
interstellar ripples swayed like eulogies
on distant waters, liquid heaven.
I grasped the surging waves that
accelerate universe’s expansion,
that weave the lives of infinite atmans into one immortal stream.
Surrendering, I fitted my scattered atoms
into the vast darkness of heavenly seeds.
And when I finally opened my eyes from this lifelong dream,
with my flesh cocooning in the warm earthly sunshine, the strelitzia
left by the black stone graced over my soul, soft, yet
piercing.