In cities of empathy we allow our hope to rest. In light we aspire to put to sleep the ghost of darkness. We are alive, dancing, many coloured, unscrupulously aware of our broken worlds, and through the cracks, we ooze, surrendering what we don’t know in the myriad grains of eternity. Like fire we splinter blue-eyed and diffident, we walk, even as the ground shackles us, even as the country swoops in, and the spent anger of the disturbed festers around our ankles. We soar, eyes closed, trusting that a sky will become, and a home will be fashioned from the kindness of hands, the gratitude of neighbours. In this we, we trust, what else is there? This is the spirit of light, the lightness of community, and the communitas of being. This is the sweet death of the object of fear, and the birth of a future outside the ken of violence. In giving, we hold what is larger than our feeble bodies, with the soft weakness of the multitudes. We fill our doorsteps with colour, and our stomachs with sweet. Like the milk that boils over, our hearts must exceed. This is not the over-reaching of greed, that covets the other, but the ambition of the author whose ecstasy outruns language, and spills into the ambiguous shadow-world of magic. With our bodies, and our unassailable celebration, we will court the new world. We will not ignore the trolls, the woke and the lazy. We will, rather, blaze louder simply because the light tickles, and laughter is nobody’s personal mansion. At the threshold of meaning we will conspire, because, like music, the fearless screech of the free needs no explanation. Perhaps, when they see the light, they will realise, what they are missing, what they truly desire.
Let there be light
P.S. Last Deepavali, I had shared this gorgeous, world-filling Aracelis Girmay poem, for the newcomers, and those who feel like relishing it again: You are who I love.
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