Ronak Gajjar

“We are what our thoughts have made us. So take care what you think. Thoughts live. They travel far.”
― Preeti Shenoy, Life is What You Make It: A Story of Love, Hope and How Determination Can Overcome Even Destiny

“Aubade to Langston"

When the light wakes & finds again
the music of brooms in Mexico,
when daylight pulls our hands from grief,
& hearts cleaned raw with sawdust
& saltwater flood their dazzling vessels,
when the catfish in the river
raise their eyelids towards your face,
when sweetgrass bends in waves
across battlefields where sweat
& sugar marry, when we hear our people
wearing tongues fine with plain
greeting: How You Doing, Good Morning
when I pour coffee & remember
my mother’s love of buttered grits,
when the trains far away in memory
begin to turn their engines toward
a deep past of knowing,
when all I want to do is burn
my masks, when I see a woman
walking down the street holding her mind
like a leather belt, when I pluck a blues note
for my lazy shadow & cast its soul from my page,
when I see God’s eyes looking up at black folks
flying between moonlight & museum,
when I see a good-looking people
who are my truest poetry,
when I pick up this pencil like a flute
& blow myself away from my death,
I listen to you again beneath the mercy
of a blue morning’s grammar.

Originally published in the Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 49.3”
― Rachel Eliza Griffiths

“The Poet Asks His Love to Write"

Visceral love, living death,
in vain, I wait your written word,
and consider, with the flower that withers,
I wish to lose you, if I have to live without self.

The air is undying: the inert rock
neither knows shadow, nor evades it.
And the heart, inside, has no use
for the honeyed frost the moon pours.

But I endured you: ripped open my veins,
a tiger, a dove, over your waist,
in a duel of teeth and lilies.

So fill my madness with speech,
or let me live in my calm
night of the soul, darkened for ever.”
― Federico García Lorca, Collected Poems

“...it is in hearing the voice of the devil that we can better appreciate the voice of god.”
― dan brown, Origin