Magic-Maya
© December 8th 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
Sunlight slipped from the tree
Into the palms of my young hands,
And I drank deep of the well of
Green-gold peace,
And found magic.
Chasing after street pigs
In my mother’s hometown,
Laughing in limpid delight
At their tails curling stiffly
Behind them, and wanting
Wanting to gaze into their
Alien eyes, and learn their
Squealing language,
My five-year-old self found
Magic.
I saw things that others did not
Creatures crawled out walls
And leered.
Goblins and spirits made free
With me.
And though I was terrified
And found myself in the old man
Who tumbled down a flight of stairs
In a Dream-Dickensian England,
I was ten,
And even that was magic.
Magic lived in the strings
Of my guitar
And resonated in
The tumba of my sitar,
In my voice that found
Songs that pleased,
And songs that
Hurt so much,
My breath got tangled
Somewhere in my throat.
And the pain swelled,
Like a raisin in water
So sweet, so full,
All those songs
Made for me alone,
In a world of magic
And dreams.
Magic thrilled the soft skin
On the back of my teenaged palms
And I saw with wonder my blue-green
Veins that popped out
Reminding me I owned a body,
One filled with blood that
Flowed through me,
And I saw that blood,
When I shone a torch
Onto my fingers in the dark.
And my blood whispered:
Magic.
Magic was in the songs the
Water-pump sang to me
In the mornings, as I
Sang along, the fifths
And thirds thrumming
Through me and the pipes;
In the lorries which snarled
And hooted, and the
Cars that honked and
Tooted, and I sang
Every time they sang,
And found their
Thirds and fifths,
And rejoiced in the magic
Of immutable music.
Magic lived in the poets,
The writers who spoke to me
In honeyed language
The language of the
Hated conqueror of my land,
And yet, I loved, utterly
Loved the magic of the words
Of the Conquering Foreigner.
And I dreamed in an alien tongue,
Of alien things that I’d never seen
And dreamed of seeing.
And in the contradictions,
I found myself,
And magic was with me.
Magic lives now in my child
And my dog, and in my
Beloved, who sings, too.
In the forests near my home,
In the flutter and brush
Of woodpecker and chickadee
And tufted titmouse and
Wood dove, as the sun
Drives them to swoop
And land on the bird-feeder
Outside my kitchen window,
Magic lives.
Magic makes me sing
Even when I feel I must die.
And though I walk with spring
In my step,
There is fall in my bones,
And winter in my blood,
And yet, and yet …
The world, so beautiful
So radiant, so cold with death
So warm with promise
So rich with life and
Beauty, so breath-filled
With lost dreams, calls me
Hums to me, nuzzles me,
Soothes me to sleep
Smoothes my face
Tells me all is not lost
All is magic,
And all is illusion.
And one day,
This too,
Will vanish.
And I will cease
To be.
And these words
Will please
Nobody.
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