The Lights That Carry Us

I travelled a lot as a child.
My father built hospitals, health centers and mosques on distant islands, and
every few months,
carrying workmen and materials,
I would find myself riding a speck on a vast breathing ocean
on my way to somewhere new.
Watching flying fish shoot out
from the calm azure glass, gliding
along with the boat for a hundred
feet and pierce back into the blue.
And I, a boy with cheek pressed against the vibrations of the engine
lying at the front of the boat with my head hanging down Wide eyed,
most mesmerized by how the bow
of the dhoani, endlessly
cleaved the sea in two.

There are few things I could look at forever.

A blazing, fire its tendrils
licking in sensual ecstacy,
never stopping, ever dancing.
The perfect metaphor for the human condition,
fire, light, dance and burning too.
The liberation of matter into smoke,
even more solid than the fuel itself.
Miraculous in how something could
hold so much in something so little. Then there is water,
sometimes calm, sometimes excited
kicking and curling up; foam laughing on its extremities.

Nieztche said that when we when gaze into the abyss,
the abyss also gazes back into us.
I am sure it is the same with these things too.

Lately, on my darkest days
I find myself thinking of moonless nights
and the child on the boat
sleepless, wide eyed, hypnotized still,
sailing a sea of void on which not even the light
of dead stars are reflected back.
It would have been terrifying,
if It wasn't so beautiful.

When you stand at the back,
you would see the path of the dhoni
illuminated by a trail of bioluminiscence
And from the front, nothing but the blackest black
except from fleeting sparks of plankton
at the place the boat and the sea met.

On these nights, I am sure
these grains of light are all that is
holding this vessel afloat.

#review #nazaal #poetry

(A dhoni is a type of Maldivian boat)