Homelands

 

We have to find a way to not forget them when we peer the glass.  Blackest clay in the riverbed.  In the chlorophyll ghosts who still speak of first churches.  Is it enough?  Ribbons of dancing light, burnished shields?  I know it hurts to be reduced like this, my beloved ones.  Rewritten, overwritten.  Epistolary bloodletting.  A cataclysm of letters.  Epigraph now to haunted text, neither heard nor read.  Nor understood.  But we have to find a way to not forget each other when we peer the glass.  All Songs, all denominations and tribes.  The grey betwixt of living annunciation.  Our differences, our similarities.  We make wisdom with it.  Or war.  Shape, form and fiction.  Like the handling of serpents.  The centre pleading hold.  Vintage threads, staving mere anarchy.  This reign we dream; hoping for the respite of an imagined kiss.  Is it enough, asks the angel.  This hushed, quivering tempest?  These arcanum shores?  The river always feeds the heart.  I know how much it hurts to be reduced like this; constantly reimagining the world.  Unable to forgive the difference between knives and feathers unfurling at your back.  These fractures between the mirror and the poet's star.  Ever shining.  But we must forgive.  We must find a way to honour the Spirit when we peer the glass.  Gold, of the streets and the sea.  Last and first churches.  Undying crown beneath this cataclysm of letters. We have spent too long trying not to see ourselves in colour.  Who built these lands?  I tell you now that Kasi is merely a servant.  An emissary baptised in dreaming depths.  Treasures of holy light glinting on the face of the waters.  Home is where the heart is, and I am not greater than the river.

Homelands from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.

Saving Grace

 

Love is a miracle in a realm where we too often squander our gifts.  Losing sight of what truly matters, only for fate to sometimes shock us into a state of reeling wakefulness.  If we’re lucky enough.  Before the spellcraft of state and their wraith-cults puts us to sleep again.  Half-light and half-life.  But there are things that can break the spell of sleep, even here in this radiant abyss. A brush with death.  An act of nature.  The care of a new child.  And suddenly we reawaken in a different way, a greater way.  More cognizant.  Made humble and wide-eyed, petty distractions fading in the light of this new wakefulness.  We finally recognise that we must become responsible in a far more powerful way.  We can no longer wander semi-coherent through the wreckage of our own mistakes.  A greater task awaits us.  Love is truly a miracle.  Beyond shame or tragedy.  We all want to believe in the promise of a second chance, don't we?  The healing poetry of forgiveness?  We often wonder what we might do differently if fairytales were real and we could somehow find our way back to that moment.  But what if fairytales were everything we desperately hoped them to be, and more?  What if you could indeed go back?  Would you love even greater?  Would you find strength enough to humble yourself and this time make the right choice?  I cannot answer those questions for anyone except myself. But I know things about the Earth that you don't, my beloved ones.  Strange, secret things.  Ka'shayel is still shaken to his core every time he opens his eyes to the Word. 

The angel in me still weeps at our fallen state.  Make no mistake about that.  It still hurts to see all this hatred and division.  Brother raging against brother, against sister.  So far from the shining ideal we once lived as common path-work.  But eventually I came to realise the truth.  I can forgive my mortal brothers and sisters for their lack of cultivated foresight, their vulnerabilities and addictions to comfort.  For not having the strength and stamina to save themselves and each other.  I love them too much to deny them that grace.  But can I ever truly forgive myself for the same?  Dear ones, I’ve seen worlds shattered and burning.  Realm after realm of brutal revelation.  Civilisations crumbling.  There were times when I didn’t know if I could go through this again.  Reliving the Last Day, over and over.  Accepting my limitations as well as my strengths.  Suspended and mirrored in holy breath.  

Who am I, really?  A poet, an angel, a father?  If I truly were a parent what would I want for my children?  I realize now that I squandered too many gifts before I learned this answer.  I would want to see my children courageous, kind and purposeful – and to eventually die within sight of their struggles and their joy.  When the time comes.  Because the human heart still shines.  Even here, among these fallen stars.  I've seen it.  I've witnessed that breath-taking magic.  That poetry in motion.  The sheer elegance of a soul in service to its brethren.  To not have all the answers, or all the context, and to leave a lantern nonetheless.  I understand it a little better each day.  My Father loves me, I think, more than I can even comprehend.  Granting me a second chance.  Stepping me from ruin to ruin, ashes to ashes, until at last I touched down in a world where all is not lost.  Where flowers still grow, rivers still run, and the possibility still exists to be more than a grieving parent or a lost child.  A world where I get to see you again.  I think heaven is saving our grace each day, despite the darkness and pain we contend with.  Our love is still alive in this realm.  Like a miracle.  I know what that miracle means to me now, my cherished one.  It means I'm going to keep giving everything I can, trying to treasure every moment.  And then, one day, I'm going to close my eyes at last.  In sight of your struggles and your joy.

Looking at Stars

Seeing through the iris of an angel is only ever partial sight.  The eyes of eternity.  Endless grey.  Human lives are so immediate and fleeting.  Abstracted, incandescent.  How does one stay mindful of mortality when we emissaries are the only things that endure?  Reading every mind in the room, every book in the library? We must fall in love each time.  The perpetual choir of human life.   The similarities, outliers and anomalies.  The beauty in each of them.  The entire breadth and breath of creation can be found in the songlines between violet and red.  Did you know?  A perception built of living light.  Everything you know, and everything you don't – an ocean of oscillating waves.  Divinity, made manifest.  A galaxy dancing and laughing, and laughing again.  The unfathomable art of our Father.  Red is the deepest wave among the visible, and violet the most subtle.  Isn't it strange how the blood howls but the crown whispers so gently?  These things are mysteries still, even to angels.  We are not exactly as portrayed in your many scriptures.  We are so much greater than the petty squabble and politic of Man.  We are the Word of God, made message.  Given winged form.  And yet, there is more truth in your scriptures than you will ever know.  Resounding eternally through the imagination of Man.  Stories told and retold.  Every library, every culture and holy place.  Still, there are lies among the truths of your pages.  I know it all too well.  However, there are secrets beneath the sea and beyond the sky.  These are the true altars of Ishkara.  Beyond bloodshed and sacrifice.  Hear this, sweet mortals.  Our Father requires no killing, nor the constant warring of his children.  A warrior's place is to defend, not desecrate.  The sickening concerns of slavery and genocide are never a true soldier's path.  Hell on Earth is not the want of your brothers and sisters.  It is the want of the wraiths that whisper at your shoulder and their dark priests who covet your life-force.  The earth is a church, my dear ones.  Not a vampire's lair.  A holy garden was made for you in the beginning.  A place of rest, reflection and healing magic.  It should be respected as such.  Embrace this immediacy.  This fleeting flesh.  It will all be over sooner than you think.  I’m no better than my fellow man.  Kasi yearns and bleeds and falters just as you do.  But I pay it gladly, this toll of love.  While we are here we must treasure each moment, each glimmering soul.  Every point of light shining in the sea of endless black.  The iris of an angel is much like the songs that mortals sing.  Ancient and new.  Steadfast and ever-changing.  Starlight is incalculable, and yet it travels far slower than poetry.  Those distant stars upon your eye?  Many of them are ghosts, holding loving vigil for the not-yet-departed.  Did you know?

Looking at Stars from Raj Sisodia on Vimeo.

Requiem

Portent comes in many forms.  A courageous girl with footsteps of glass, or a thoughtful boy alone at the ivory.  Trying to pick a lock of eighty-eight keys.  The lock of a thousand stars.  I've seen that kind of wonder held in the palm of angels far brighter than myself.  Angels of mortal provenance suspended in the place between fable and heartbreak.  Remembrance, as the true healers of lost Roma believed.  To be loved, to be seen for the wild and wilderness that we are.  Each of us.  To close your eyes when your beloved does.  To close your eyes to the entire universe, only to open them in union.  Or as close to union as a heart can venture.  I've walked beside each of you.  The winged unseen.  Bright Star.  The men and women we become.  The lost children we’ve always been, and are still trying so desperately to protect.  Blessed ones, it's not my place to guide your hands across the ivory or the fret.  Nor my place to tell you what melodies mean. My place is simple compliment, never claim.  I only listen, staggered by the grace I find in those places where diligence meets spontaneity.  Places where my friends truly bloom.  Those fields and keys of lavender where I am humbled, gladdened and taught.  Like a kiss poised so earnest and delicate in the reign of rising light.  That's real study, I think.  True scholarship.  To be moved by the work of your friends, both cherished and unmet.  If I were any kind of angel worth his salt I would reach for those kinds of footsteps and that kind of thoughtfulness.  Each day I would pray and pledge to know more of those courageous hands in mine, half-hidden though they seem.  To earn respite from this loneliness.  To truly earn the kiss, or the kind word.  There is no greater grace than a heart that wants to lift you; a heart that remembers you always.