Traditions

I fear I am a poet, tradition bound

to mostly ignore systems – documents -

though I’ll use paper to scribble around

to hold onto some meanings, and moments.

I do use paper, I will freely admit

and I don’t abhor the screen, I’m using one -

but some nerve rebels if I’m asked to show it.

I won’t comply. That too is tradition.

You see, paper’s fragile. Identity

is carried somewhere else, in the stories

of foremothers travelling from one city

to the next, braiding streams, estuaries.

Through many rivers, borders, crisscrossed lands;

tradition too, the tangling of those strands.

Flexi-identity

What kind of papers? Will this portrait do?

My aunt had drawn it on a whim, freehand,

many years ago. I was twenty two.

The eyes are the same. You must understand –

I wasn’t written into the family tree

since that would mean rubbing me out again

upon marriage. We’re flexi-identity.

Daughters. Wives. A multitude of women

each one of us. Okay, what about this?

My father’s letter, mailed from Najafgarh,

the postmark is clear, the name and address.

Will this be proof enough to consider?

Well, that’s it. I can’t show you anything else

except old letters, treasures, some torn bills.

Take it back!

I refuse to shrink to a plastic card,

a stamped deed for a factory or courtyard,

an affidavit, a certificate,

a timid thumbprint on some ancestral debt.

Not for me your laws on citizenship.

I am the soil, the berth, the landing strip.

I’m the weed, the waving grass, the creeping vine

that covers the rubble of all your designs.

I grow everywhere out of all the cracks

in your architectures of bills and acts.

How will you stop me? - I’m the rolling clod

which is small in size but its world is broad.

No, not for me your thoughtless wall and fence,

I’m the tiny blade and the soil immense.

I was planning a nice feel good festive post this week, but what with all that's going on back home, kind of impossible to achieve.  

Season's greetings to you and yours and warmest wishes for an awesome New Year 2020!