A River Remembers

June 2012

Teach me the old names of things
Teach me the names of numerous places
You and I have traversed
In countless lifetimes, in countless forms
Teach me the language of prayer
That trickled down through generations
of consciousness

Tell me the stories that are lost in the entrapments
of mortality.

When I came I tried to remember
What stories we had shared
In lifetimes forgotten
Tell me where the stories go
When the body floats away
as ashes.

I look around
here and there.
I travel the world
and go nowhere.

I look at faces
and try to remember
But the mirror has been tarnished
with forgetfulness.

Where did we come from?
Where did we disappear?
What did the earth smell like
When it rained there?

I hear stories of home
From my ninety-year-old grandma
She talks of a big house
And describes how it turned people-less.
One by one
In revolution, and in war,
Fight and flight,

The house turned its own ghost.
She talks of the river
That flowed through the country
The rebel that the river was
Crossing forbidden boundaries
Carrying soil and rocks
Over cracks in between lands and people.

Sometimes, she would stop to remember
Squint her eyes, and talk softly
Of a time so long ago
That it can turn into yellow,
Half-torn pages of modern history books.

Sometimes, when she would stop
In between her stories,
I could hear the boatman’s songs
I could hear the rage of the river,
On whose breasts the stories floated –
They came and they went by
And they floated in the scent of the soil,
In the loss-laden thunderstorms,
In the stories that the wind carried
On the water’s back
Through countless generations of flesh and blood
That dissipated and disappeared
As ashes into deep chasms of the river,
As songs, as rain,
As stories of remembrance.