I eat in grandmother's crystal plates
specially imported from France in 1935
since then, they have been the legacy of love,
felicity of abundance, marvellously transparent,
they are bewildered by the splash of curry
the hot spice flaring their foreign belly
bursting into a secret flame of sunrise
I stroke their edges tracing years that went by
years bereft of prayers, years bereft of light
the silence hidden in their contours is compassionate
words are lances hanging on the edge of silver knives
I eat in grandmother's crystal plates
specially imported from France in 1935
and call myself an eternal pilgrim of life.

Jaspreet Mann

They think of those people
who take away their jobs,
who speak a language
they cannot understand,
who live in tenements
and send their money home,
who eat dogs and rats
and spend their nights alone
in a haze of sweet smoke,
and they think of his words,
And no matter what happens,_
the Chinese must go!_

Poem and Pic Courtesy: The New Yorker
Link: ​https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-lost-poetry-of-the-angel-island-detention-center

I will tell you about it some time, when the time is right (it is never right)
I have thought of Joni Mitchell, how she tells me to get back to my 'garden'
my garden, the long stretch of emptiness, I left long ago among the clouds
​beckons me with words, with lost notes I can't recall anymore, the sound of fire
fresh in my bones, I can't recollect how rivers turned bloody in the wine glass
or how cutlery took the form of an Acheulean axe shaped with the hurt of distress
my heart is the cleaving of summer buried inside floorboards that reek of rust
people talk of spring, the fragrance of wild roses, in a country that is not my own
I look for summer in basements with sunshine starved in the trauma of stone
depression has synonyms, one sinks in the nightmares of their facelessness
a moment of recklessness, an hour of grotesque, a day entangled in duress
the sky is a catacomb of macabre stars, the earth is a carcanet of endless wars
we look for people, people look for us, in hurricanes of nebulous horrors
the world collapses in an eclipse of unspoken thoughts, trapped behind doors.

~jm

Life is too long to be always happy.  There are moments when we fall and then there are times when we rise.  But all said and done, we are the same person inside. If I have learnt something, it is this- beauty is just a myth. We all carry the torch of our splendid beauty inside our heart and mind. We know our scars, regrets, wounds, worries and trepidations. Time does not heal anything. We heal ourselves. We grow like a rose on an abandoned briar with character, integrity and determination of our own mind.  This is how we live. This is how we survive.