We should leave ancestral homes
where we learned to walk.
And I could see myself in the past
as a ghost.
Last day, I saw myself doing homework
from my school days.
Before that, one week back,
I saw myself at the dining table
with a wound from a kitchen knife.
The shadows of the past
follow as ghosts in ancestral homes,
so we have to leave them.
It is hard to distinguish shadows from reality,
and painful too.
Skulls—
broken and scattered,
fragments of bone,
the shattered wheels of chariots.
Yes,
we must dig here
for the springs
of blood.
What remains here now
to be read
are the hieroglyphs
someone once carved—
shapes we recognize,
meanings we do not.
Like a rabbit
leaning out
from a silver cloud.
Neither a heart
nor the sky
holds moisture
in this barrenness.
Yet they wait to sprout,
wait with ears turned to rain.
The seeds
belong to flowering plants—
and someone,
somewhere,
must be waiting
for those flowers too,
silent,
beyond the ages.
Still deeper—
toward the hidden springs
