Aubade
Somewhere in the sunshine of the everlasting dawn
from my airborne stance
I feel absorbed across the broad pavement.
Or am I dissolved in a voice
that can’t sever from its verse.
Am I adrift in my heritage? To shadow the breath
of our dear Guru Nanak. To hear him chant
his om that balms
the rivers of old India. I sense his aura
hold the wounded over water
till they’re healed.
In my suburbia, all around me,
the saffron trees are unearthly presences.
They bow turn by turn
and seem to caress or bless
with breeze and gentle leaf
each wearied pedestrian.
Have I become so numbed by routine
and the reasoned life
that flecks from my past would ascend
from within to raise my flesh
so it learns outright pain?
In my feeble conceits, am I haunted by obsessions
and can’t keep off the need to revive
the lost faith?
My dire need to survive above the sphere.
The idea of the vision as practice charged into plenitude.
All that Sikhism charm from my childhood
has me span the soul of Nanak
from Lahore to Harrow. His soul uprooting concrete
so the nerves of the world are flexed
and greened by the branches of his lungs.
His soul seems everywhere, guiding us to head
for the centre of this road
where he has opened the earth
so it spreads into a river gush.
Into which, are we are being lifted by the trees?
Could Nanak’s branch-arms haul us
and wallow us in his equable waters,
return us freed
from the grief-ache?
So we’re built to withstand the ruin of sense.
From Daljit Nagra's British Museum (Faber 2017) with kind permission
Read more poetry by Daljit Nagra in our From the Archive series - Four Poems, from ALR14, Winter 2009
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