Becoming the Sea
It was a house with crooked walls.
We used to laugh, saying we slept each night with our wills beside us,
never knowing when it might collapse.
In those days, when redevelopment was still a distant dream,
the river of my childhood and youth rushed through that place in torrents.
That house of mud bricks—even through its prison-like windows,
the sunlight that barged in without restraint was my very lifeblood.
Everything else was piled away in my old drawer.
Our nest was neither grand nor prosperous, yet it was warm.
Back then, green diaries were written, and days ripened gently like the moon.
Now my mother, whose sphincter has weakened with age,
renders even a bidet unnecessary;
whether the affairs of the world race past like an arrow or not,
her time has come to rest at seventy-nine.
The river water, having reached the sea, lets go of itself.
Ah, life is the task of becoming the sea.
The curved wall was a line bending toward the sea.
Where is she who was once me?
And where is the I who was once her now heading?
Aura Physics
They say I was born from stardust,
where, then, did I come from?
They say we are all children of the stars.
They say I am one among twelve colors
but which light am I?
My small self was born upon this Earth,
once a star, and then another star, before dimming into darkness.
They say the inner heart and the outer heart are both made of light.
They say this body of mine,
with its sixty trillion cells, is itself a constellation of shining stars.
The self no one knows, the self even I do not know,
it is I who turn the switch of that light off and on.
I am the fruit of parents upon parents,
of ancestors stretching beyond measure,
of the parents of parents,
and the parents before them.
They say I am a seed. They say I am a root.
So many stars rise within me that I now realize:
we had already been shining,
bathed in the primordial
violet-crimson sunlight
of the beginning of time.
*Aura: the subtle spiritual energy believed to radiate from a person or object
