(Be)longing

Don’t ask me questions
look at my eyes.

You long to dissolve in my vastness
and I long to be the sky.

You want to find me in your prayer
And I search for faces in stone.

Hunger you ask, I am starved.
Thirst? Have not seen an oasis for long.
Anguish? Pain?
I have prayed for all those.

Where you see veils,
I see gossamer strands
waiting for finger trails,
Created unknowingly.

And all those sounds
that you hear at sunset
omnipresent among them is mine.
Whispers,
Mostly silent.

Sculpting words,
not in voices,
Not in any name,
trying to find a name.

And the thoughts that you have,
Carnal, impure, touched.
washed cleaned and worshipped
of things that could have been,
and of times that must have gone by.

And I belong
while I drift
to you.

Is that not obvious?

13 Jan 2004

(Manisha's poem Longing stayed on the mind. And I wrote this one using the cell phone while on a Mumbai local.)