Without the sky,
branches still hold a story.
Winter wood grows out of my mouth.

Tell the doves next door
I am not alone.
Tell the storm
I still have a god.

Bit by bit, they will erase my contour.
Bit by bit, I will become a purple sky
with seven moons — 
nothing.

Vaishali Paliwal

America to me was always these small towns in the middle of nowhere where there was one school, one church and everyone knew each other and these places were so much at peace with themselves like they knew exactly what they were about — the streams, the stores and the white fences all clear about their roots and their branches and their skies. Unlike the terrible and the dirty and the lit big cities constantly in eruption and change unsure of their multiple different dreams and desires, these small places off the grid held one diner and there was one table and one family that was in its fourth generation under the same roof not tied to a dream but to a place that didn’t want anything. One can sit and romanticize anything. I for one never got over the bluebonnet cafe towns in Texas and the families I met during those road trips and how I questioned then how could one never leave the safe shores and never sail to the unknown horizons and how I have always wanted that to be proved wrong. But anyway these are the roads of America’s solitude and also her passion — the undercurrent of these settlements deciding her future. This beautiful nation with her grand and diverse landscapes torn apart with her ideologies — somehow a reflection of individual psyches, the push and pull of homes and moving roads, of systems and stones, natives and travelers, jobs and farms, towns and cities. The sun is covered with clouds and I am waiting. America breathes slowly this afternoon by the beach and makes a sand castle that I am protecting with my broken poetry. Back in the diner the same soup is on the menu.

Vaishali Paliwal

In this flower of July

This fragrance my soul

Green water of winter, of summers passed by, of shadows wet in love and despair, past nostalgia, past apocalypse, past eclipse,

this water speaks.

This water speaks to me like a stranger pretending to be mine, like a lover pretending to be estranged.

Why must we live in between these two opposite suns ? Two dreadful suns neither owning us, nor letting us be. We play this game. We try to worship one god. We fail. We stop the works. We destroy the path. We burn. We rise again. We try to worship another god.

The water speaks to me asking me why must I look for records, why must I try to remember the color of my childhood bird. That amnesia is not always a disease. But I keep the count. I keep the count of memories that are vapor. And I call it the source of my devil winds.

I am the black flamingo of tar wings hunting and eating soft roots. My sharp claws and my red tongue have defaced the forest.

The writer dies. Forgets being the ghost of the green pond. Forgets being the heavy body of the fish water. Forgets eating the mud of new moon nights. Forgets listening to the frogs. Forgets sleeping on the rock of pilgrims.

Earth continues to fold, bend from within. All sea-plants break. There is a cotton storm under our feet.

The writer is a dead dog sniffing the remains of ships of conquerors, sniffing the handkerchiefs of women abducted. The writer is the gatekeeper. The writer is the last woman standing of the iron world. The writer must die again.

And it gets darker and wolves start climbing the walls of my wood shelter. Green water goes quiet. Pulls me into its crystal night. Pen sinks to the bottom. Heavy body of tar wings, cotton storms and pilgrim rocks surfaces.

Vaishali Paliwal

December 28, 2023

Winter came and tore me into two.
Your half love tore me into two.
Two poets are torn into two.

Where is the beginning and end of this partition?

Where can you find me now?
Where can I not write my poems?

Who is to read this relic?
Who is to not understand love?

We are incomplete in our appearance.
We could be something in our absence.

Vaishali Paliwal

She hugged the tree with red body and red locks. A murder of crows kept making mad and loud sounds, filling the sky with black wings as dusk hour continued to put calves to sleep. Everyone stared at the autumnal sky with prayers on their tongues, with a memory stretching far back to the eyes of a ravine and the first ancestor.

Does she need to write of this? Again? She wonders. This repetitive tale of rice recipes and departures. This puzzle of seeing the mystic again or not. This estranged desert of poetry. This empty thought disgusted over absence yet only of the absence. This crisis she will not speak of from the stomach. Not speak of from violent abandonment or intoxicated sunsets, not from lust or from identity. Not from pen. This time. This time it is brittle. Only of a crack.

VPaliwal

Flute magician unknown. Other world unknown. Time and space unknown. Lady soaking the sun unknown. Sun unknown. Lady carrying the woods unknown. Thought and breath unknown.

This realm of not knowing, this movement without ideas and concepts, this empty vessel devoid of definitions of potency, this pause, I have known before from the shade of the only flower tree in the desert of life.

One drop of water without intention, without resistance, without even surrender. This drop of water from her palm to mine. She, the container and protector of music of the forest.

The man, the man, the flute man, only a sound for me, sent by the unknown god, sweet sweet god, honey sound.

Vaishali Paliwal

https://www.instagram.com/p/CdYQ-RqlAYD/

Honey Sound was originally published in Soul & Sea on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One day I will touch the stone in the same way I did back two thousand years back. No. Twelve thousand years back. Or Before. Before the thought for symbol. Rather. Before the thought.
Vpaliwal

A native to southern tropical India grows now on an earth far far away. One wonders how were the hands that carried these roots across seven seas, that brought these blooms back to a native in a foreign land, to a migrant in a native land, in a foreign land.

How silly our words are, how fragile our definitions.

How mysterious this breeze is, how mysterious the volcano rising that no one seems to be too worried about.

This piece of native earth I walk on now was bought for fifty dollars. This entire forest of yellow red trumpetvines was bought for fifty dollars.

The clocks, the telescopes, the water filters were built before this sale without scientists, without artists. The stars, the witchcraft, the horn of the unicorn were all ours before this sale. After this sale, we have repeatedly recited our poems staring at the same mirror.

Now, I have removed all my clothes. I have rolled my bare body on the black earth of the thick forest. I have smelled the flower not belonging to this land or the other, not growing in the present or the past, not the future.

V Paliwal

Vpaliwal

Repacking colors and histories, looking for purses, giant purses to carry translations.

Vp