Before the Ancestral Home

The new key is not mine.

The paint, a different shade of silence.

But the gate still groans the same old note,

and the light — the light is a blade of memory,

cleaving the now from then.

I stand where I stood,

countless times before 

and the ghost of that afternoon rises,

like a heat shimmer on the lawn.

The light is a glare, a confession.

The rubber tree to the left

resembles a pendant of jade, 

with ruby sheaths where leaves are yet to emerge.

I can still spot where I dragged

a faint line in the compost,

a sacred sentence written and then erased.

My eyes ride past the roses, 

nailed like dried prayers to the wall;

past the pond’s blank eye.

When I look up, the garden is empty.

But the air is thick 

with the smell of broken fruit,

and across the grass, 

a shadow lies without a source —

a narrow plinth dividing 

what was mine from what was not.

The air is still, like a lull before a storm,

ungodly quiet, but full of shapes turning.

The house is a shell, a prop,

but the land holds the ritual,

and I am the only one who comes to kneel.

***

Stroke

A morning might begin like this, windows closing to light, 

a punch of darkness delivered to the solar plexus of a day.

Your voice barely audible on the phone saying you’d had a fall 

that you could barely move, could barely swallow.

I‘ll be right there. The long, tight grip of rain 

on my heart. Six hours of thinking the worst before I reach. 

Kind neighbours have shifted you to the hospital. You’re in the 

ICU, tubes and wires rudely in and out of your body.

I climb the mountain of the moment. Your eyes brighten when they

spot me. Your gaze sews my fears. Daddy. Our hands cling.

Tomorrow I’ll know a numbness colder than your skin.

A flattening of all things. How will I vocalise the rising rale of pain? 

Loss, a peepul tree, will take roots inside my chest. 

For years it will grow — leaf by leaf. For years the earth will feel heavier. 

***

Is That You, God?

Mother became strangely silent days before she passed, 

avoiding my searching glance, my probing questions.

The stitches on her abdomen nothing 

compared to the way she’d stapled shut her voice,

not even asking, ‘Why me, God?’

A rubble of self-censure hit me, 

my tongue bled from biting on my inadequacies,

even as she lay dying in a hospital room.

Is there ever a time for self-deprecation?

How I clung to your name then, God.

That night when I unlocked the door

to an empty house, when loss palpitated

in the dark rooms and the parchment of grief

crackled in every molecule of air,

you came disguised as a whiff of mother’s perfume, God.

Now the gulmohar by my house bends low over the road,

providing shade to passers-by on scorching May afternoons,

the way a mother might shield her children;

arms splayed wide, caring, embracing.

I wonder if that gulmohar is you, God?

***

Conversation with a Seed  

Just the two of us here,

sitting face to face. 

Me, a fleck of paused intention

in a coat of dulled brown,

and you: cupped earth.

Outside, goldenrod glowers acid-yellow

in the spruce’s long shade,

rocks clutch their shadow-rags.

Even the granite’s orange lichen

sheds its skin.

But here, in this damp silk

of shaded afternoon,

we touch the quiet.

You think me small?

Listen — this dark is patient craft.

Not like the gull’s slow lope

across a clammy sky,

not like the fireweed’s

unchosen, breeze-less fall.

This dark, is root-ward,

deep and cool as spruce-resonance,

thrumming a different hum.

***

Undergrowth 

I, of the undergrowth.

My beginning 

the rot’s warm sigh.

Autumn is not a shout,

but a whisper 

against the curved roof of my world.

Orange, yellow, russet 

playing something

old and forgotten against ribs.

The rain falls, strand over strand.

I know this rhythm, 

deep within my tightly-folded self.

It is the patient braiding of potential,

filament by filament,

in the secret dark

What do I offer in return 

for this soaking benediction

I have no bright bloom to present.

Only this: an intent, cupped deep in my core,

tilting my whole being

towards the unseen source.

***

Excerpted with permission from The Hour of God by Vinita Agrawal published by Red River 2026