(To Kathy Paysen)

Come, take my hand, and let us go.

We have still not found our vision, though
Centuries of struggles have wasted deaths.

Bounded by the emotions we felt ourselves
Where the crowded landscape repeats itself
Where the disturbed visions
Intrigued by the shadows in the mirror
Strike us back to our own confinements.
And persuasions that flow with faceless
Uneventful happenings,
Speak volumes of unpresentings.

My heart plucks a shade from the past
To its present reckoning and the spirit embraces
The celebrations in the time-lined experiences.
I know the hand that touched the being
Persuades the form that even now
Has not completed its own conception.

It was another matter that we chased
Our shadows through the dank corridors
With the dampness in our hearts.
It was another matter that my dream died
In the scream of the rushing sparrows
When the twilight extended its narrowed folds
To clinch the sky and the likely shadows
Filled the corners of my backyard.

Of course, the universe stays with us all along;
Always reminding of the wisdom that it brings
To the experiential knowledge of being.
Not from the attention but awareness,
Not from the expression but
From the magical flowering of thoughts.

So, being poets that we were,
We changed the broken visions to words
For the visions had lost their meanings.

So, take my hand, and let us go.
Into the beckoning fields of joyous perceptions,
Into the welcoming receptacle of fond remembrances,
Into the lofty incarnations that come unawares
Unsettling the boundaries of imagination.

And then, forgive my heart that speaks
From the vacuum of its own unbeing.

- Sushil Soni