Category: Poetry

How do we break free? I grapple with this question each day, yet the answer is not clear. I must delve within my soul, but where is the answer hidden? We must speak our truth, yet the truth has been spoken for centuries, and we still remain in a maelstrom of hate. I stare out at the vastness of our universe; no answers echo back. Within you must go, within lies the answer.  Silence your mind. In silence, not solitude, will the answer appear. Love. How do we cultivate love to stop hate? Perhaps the answer is obvious. Great writers of our time have spoken of love, as though it is a panacea of hope. Will it wash away hate? Who breeds hate? Why do those who hate unite with such reverence? While those who seek love are divided, and bring further hate to their clans?  Colonialists spawn hate in order to divide and conquer. The imperialist remain steadfast in their unity, while the colonized continue to sow the seeds of partition. How did we become so wretched? We draw lines based on colour, ethnicity, gender, and status. The list carries on, we find more areas to divide love. We fail to find love in our hearts, yet love is where we must return to.  

By Surita Jhangiani

I spent the last 5 years watching and walking alongside you. At times it seemed dark and lonely. Did anyone understand this journey? Could I explain what it was like to watch you die from ALS? It was a long tunnel, filled with darkness and light along the way. I learned to embrace laughter, to see life in a different light. With impending death comes seeing the joy in life that we over look, relishing in the smaller delights of life that are larger than they appear. The last five years have imprinted in my mind brighter moments that I would have over looked, savouring moments with you that I would have let slip away to focus on the more consuming but inconsequential aspects of my life, work. It’s hard to not have you here physically, but our time together helped me see what mattered, and where my energies and ambitious should lay and what should be left to wither away. When I think I can’t do it, I remember you, what you went through, and I carry on. You took on one of life’s hardest lessons, facing an agonizing disease that took more and more of you each day with grace; this propels me to move forward and embrace this new path. As the year closes, I find part of me unwilling to let go, but with this chapter closing comes new ways of being and new ways of seeing. I learn to slowly let go of what I thought life should look like and welcome falling into the ebb and flow that comes.

By Surita Jhangiani

I ache for an embrace that our existence will be okay 

That Fear can be demolished 

I want to breathe for life, and no longer hold my breath in hope that we exist 

I want a world where you can be free, and not be bound and chained by a world that commodifies you 

I want us to grow and not drown 

Why can’t I bring these hopes to you? I want to save you, but I can’t… I see the longing in you to live and the reflection in your eyes that I can’t save you.  

Please save what I love, but am losing 

If you look back far enough

You can see the blood that has fallen from my soul and lies at your footsteps.  It amazes me how you never see the massacre at your feet. You calmly walk over my history as you smile and walk hand in hand with your kin, as if the world were made for you. Take a moment and peer at the past, a past you thought was beautiful is built upon my blood. You seized my blood; it nurtured your growth, but you never looked back and thanked what fertilized your world. Why? You’ve created stories of glories never achieved, fame that inflamed, all to bury the truth of the past. A past of jealousy and fear so deep that it depraved the innocent of sustenance, yet their blood sustained your growth.  

If you acknowledge my presence in you, does your glory diminish? The foundation of your existence lies in my death, my death grew you. You flourished with each drop, grew stronger, sought knowledge and truth, all from the bloodshed that lays your feet.  

But whose truth do you seek?