Hunched, with a cane, under whipping echoes
of foreign men’s curses, he half-squatted, half-

sat pregnant with, heaving, a chest-full lifetime of
lies slipping through the shackles of his blank gaze;

on his trembling lap sits his children’s hopes
crafted in Hindi on generic postcards; one falls

onto his scabbed foot swollen from the earth’s
protestations against his lot – his only worth.

Published in SINGPOWRIMO:THE ANTHOLOGY, edited by Ann Ang, Joshua Ip and Pooja Nansi, Math Paper Press (2014)

Words are poor things

Sometimes
I have loved
the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday.
It is like standing
in a newly planted garden after a warm rain.
You can feel
the silent and invisible life.
Any human face
is a claim on you, because
you can’t help but understand
the singularity of it,
the courage and loneliness of it.
But this is truest of the face of an infant.
I consider that to be one kind of vision,
as mystical as any. Love is
holy because it is like grace–
the worthiness of its object is never
really what matters.
There is no justice
in love, no proportion in it,
and there need not be,
because in any specific instance it is
only a glimpse or parable
of an embracing, incomprehensible reality.
It makes no sense at all
because it is the eternal breaking in
on the temporal. So how could it
subordinate itself to cause or consequence?
There are a thousand thousand reasons
to live this life,
everyone of them sufficient.
Grace has a grand laughter in it.
There’s so much to be grateful for,
words are poor things.

Published in SingPoWriMo 2016: The Anthology (Math Paper Press: 2016)