A Half-Remembered Dream

An Ode to my Grandmother

Sunlight fractures across a half-remembered terrace,
where marigolds bloom, tender and unrelenting.

In the silence, a teacup chimes.

Sometimes, the wind remembers the footsteps on mosaic tile.
It moves through the veranda, where Ama once stood, 

her eyes hollow, answering to something I was never born to witness.

We exist in these liminal spaces:

in airports, where my father sobs, in my loving memory,

in moments where silence is sung as sacred,
when I sit, innocently watching planes vanish into the valley.

It is carnal how I learned to archive love in syllables and in artifacts,

as if they aren't bound by the very laws of impermanence.

These are the deserts: not barren, but brimming with images 

of selves, estranged against a fading past.

There is no language

For how time threaded her absence through my body.
I hold onto the myth that our memory was not fiction.

That she existed. 

That she exists, still.

I still see her in my dreams

She is always young,

always waiting.

And I am suspended in a moment that has long passed.

I stand on the edge of memory,
where her presence flickers like sunlight on water,

knowing,
I will return a thousand more times
for a glimpse of those eyes I once mistook for god.