Like Ganaji

They sat watching ganaji come in off the plain, jagged this way, sparking with flame. The thunder rolling, the clouds metallic-grey, that ganaji, that lightning, that Wetterleucten, quickening the heart rate. From the verandah, not the stoop nor the open field, watching that lightning man dance, coming in from the distance, coming from the universe, that ganaji at play.

*

The Poet felt lightning in their life, been struck by it, laid low by it, a thunderbolt to the brain, or should they say, the mind, heart, soul, the complete self. The sky opened up, not to swallow them whole or drown them with rain, but to show The Poet the way.

The Poet was there crossing the Bridge with their parents when lightning came through the roof of the car, or hit the ox cart, or as they walked on foot from afar, when they alone saw historical spirit and the earth opened up. The Poet in that moment saw all is the world in its very presence, so vast, so open, what it was to comprehend the moment in its eternal singularity, in its universal particular, in its luminescent hopes.

The Poet felt lightning once more in a dream of great proportion, where an ancestor from a distant land came to speak to them about the task at hand, what was to be done from where they stand. An old person wrinkled with time carrying the ancestors of the past from all over the continent, from saltwater to desert sand, from mountains to islands, from clouds of lightning. And The Poet woke up.

Lightning came into The Poet the first time they were with The Lover, in how their bodies, minds, souls, hearts, kidneys, lungs, desires mingled in flame and they forget the mist and the haze and the day, turning the night into stare. The Poet could see then the future of their life, all of it, and the Death that would come for them when the time was up, when lightning ran out.

*

And they knew what ganaji meant, knew what it was to find it in darkness, to watch and wait for the strike, for the minute of insight when the weight of the world lifted, when they saw what it was to be conscious, to become at peace, at one with the cosmos from the crayfish to the planets, from the beetle to the galaxy, from the wood to the sun. And when ganaji came, they would be there to meet him as one.

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