Ghalib, the storm
will be your resting place. Its eye will be your watchman;
your mourning rites will lead to your freedom;
your love for this world will leak out
drop by drop until you are all love turned inside out.

Cloud in the eye
will be your father, sun in the eye will be your
teacher, woman in white walking with woven
basket balanced on her head, will hold
your fortune, strange and sumptuous fruit.

Ghalib, I hear you
will journey to the distant land where the teacher
is as ready as the student, where your heart will be filled with giving
everything you know away, where you may dance for the first time
with abandon long awaited, where your arms can open up and out
like petals of a lotus.

I will not be watching;
I will not be the bindi on the forehead of the guru's wife;
in the photo she looks happy and the guru also;
it is said he cured a king and saved a plainsman.

The guru, if he is a good one,
will teach you your own song, the one you wrote in your dream,
and he will bind you with what you wish for and what you dread,
connection without loss, connection that risks losing everything.

Weep with oneness
as you find yourself to be an other, your path straight and curved
and crooked; may you sing hallelujahs as you stumble, as you rise up.
May you remember your love of thunder and drum, fresh basil and brown rice,
thick fog that rolled in suddenly on Mt. Tam when we traveled together.

Travel gladly, Ghalib,
with your new tribe; tribe of youth, tribe of hot sand and metal drum;
in your sojourns you will be welcomed and you will be lonely and while
your heart breaks it will be whole, beating like a flower
and wings of the hummingbird.

Here I am,
Ghalib, dry as bone, sheathed in unexpected beauty,
dreaming often of day lilies as they fold into night
and crisp air fills these hills and valleys.

Such is love, Ghalib,
what we dread and wish for are the same. I begin again and again
to write to you before I pass from this earth into her moist darkness,
earth that pours the seas and rivers into my waiting mouth.

By Doris Ferleger