Okay, now listen; I will tell you:
It is the beauty of the soul leaking out kora notes:
the strumming of strings to summon ancient sounds;
the jostling of instruments, taking turns to flaunt joy;
the ringing beauty of strings teaching silence to listen;
The taming of distressed, tremors of the mind’s heart.
That’s what makes me wonder. That and this:
The beauty in the protestations of the raindrop:
its thinning as it clings to the armpit of the chestnut leaf
before its eventually yields to gravity’s pull,
and joyfully splomps into a marriage with the pool.
Oh, the soft footsteps of memory in the widening ripples!
Yes, that’s what makes me wonder. That and more:
How the illicit affair between illusion and delusion
leads to a pregnant ego whose firstborn is absurdity.
How, in the face of obstinate and blind arrogance, indignity
tumbles out of the brain’s placenta not as a stillborn,
but as a mutilated mutation of humility.
It is true, that’s what makes me wonder. But there is more:
The way the testosterone-tamed vapours of the past
come to congeal into the frigid fears of the present.
How bitter-sweet crystals of doubt torture the future.
How Confusion stands dazed in a desert of thought.
not as culprit but as a witness to wages of sweet sin.
And not only that, this also makes me wonder:
How the present is a prisoner of the past:
How it’s dicey to forge a future fraught with fog
because what will happen will happen – or not!
How the future is a fleeting flare of fire whose light
is the burst of dust from the clash of distant gods.
That and this, too, makes me wonder:
How, in daring to define life as triumphant,
we bounce to the dreamy dance of dunces:
Is it being praised for excelling in certain things?
Is it scaling the peaks of the material and the immaterial?
Or is it persistence in the dance of the conscious coherences?
Those questions are what make me wonder. Then there is this:
The ceaseless clash or catch of man’s world of crash or clutch;
The way excitable neurons search for a mirror to copy or destroy;
The way resilience of conceit and narcissism makes a mockery of age;
The way rank relativism reclines in the womb of greed posing as a sage.
Ha! the shocking truth in the moral elasticity of a truth that is also coy.
I also wonder:
How it is that, in the quantum tango we call life,
Mercy can tackle and mock Cruelty’s efforts to entangle,
breaking its icy, clawing hands on the rocky shores of love?!
And yet, in this random universe, seen from whichever angle,
violence is the parent, and life and love its scattered offspring.
I wonder:
How a brief interlude of silence
abides amidst the maddening chaos
How the memory of the founding fires
lies embedded as much in our genes
as in the heaving hotness of the heavens.
‘Daughter: do you sometimes fear about the future?
‘Dad: I don’t fear the future – the future should fear me!
But, yes, I think about obstacles, failures ahead but…’
‘Daughter: obstacles and failure are good for you;
They strengthen you – if they are not disastrous!’
Fear and the Future: I wonder too about this conversation with Tele
The Mountains – all dressed up with nowhere to go.
Their smooth velvet shoulders and curved breasts…
Their mild tremble in honour of the passing breeze…
Their whimsical smiles in the shimmering noon sun…
Oh, how the fluency of their silent strength annoys time!
Mountains, all dressed but nowhere to go: They make me wonder
How we are all doomed by the freedom of imprisonment:
Tightly tethered on a lonely blue orb by gravity’s freedom;
How, without this freedom, we would flail fearfully
wandering about, fighting to flee from a fleeing universe.
How mercifully funny to forget to fear the fate of the blue orb!
The freedom of imprisonment: That is what makes me wonder
How, in peering deep into Deep Time, we tiptoe
on the wings of escaped light, into the heart of ancient violence.
How, through the prism of present pain, we peer into promised pain;
for it is said that we are forged in a crucible of the highest temperature.
Thus begotten, so we beget; on and on, besotted; married to living death.
The history in the future of violence: That is what makes me wonder.
