The Book

by Rohinton Daruwala

So, you have been chosen

to read the book of the Akashi.

Whether you have come by way

of years of study and learning,

through parchment, paper or holo-vids

or you have come seeking a bridge

across the vast chasm of your grief

or misfortune, you are welcome.

To read, you will enter a room

filled with the soft light of

both mornings and evenings.

The red lined ribbons of energy

protecting the book will part

for you and you alone and

the book will reveal itself

in the form easiest to understand -

paper or screen or melody

or a liquid bubbling up smells,

and at first it may seem to you

either vastly confusing

or a disappointment.

Some see an endless moving sea

of symbols that wink in and out

of existence, while some see a mirror

reflecting only their own puzzled faces.

You will be allowed to stay a while,

until the symbols fall or grow

in number and achieve patterns

you can comprehend and meditate on.

You may have great truths

revealed to you, or great lies

reflected back into your emptiness.

You will know when you are done.

The single endless page of the book

will have turned either a sterile white

or an unbearably fecund uniform black.

Then, in peace, you will leave the place

of the book and wander, allowing the world

to read some of your pages.

And as the years pass and you are

emptied and filled again with the words

of living and breathing and dying,

you will at times discern a sigil

from the book in the shape of a cloud,

a matra from one of its words

framing the face of your beloved

or the sound of one of its phrases

repeated in the rush of a stream

you chanced upon alone and unhurried.

Then, you will realise for all

the gap of years since you saw

its gold-lighted pages, you are still,

in every moment of your existence,

reading the book.