As often as I could I would ‘find’ seeds out of a pomegranate for Saagar and leave them in a bowl for him in the fridge. He loved them.

This poem by Mona Arshi brought back this memory so vividly as if the above lines were in the present tense. It wasn’t so long ago that they were. But now what is, is.

It’s the small things that matter, that I miss the most, that I remember. The small things we do for each other are big.

Ode to a Pomegranate

Sweet sequins
turned strange and delicate,
such feverish capsules!

Sita’s shy dowry stones.
And rubies, brilliant rubies.
Vials of pure narcotic, secreted
by fragments of daybreak.

Fat drops of rain
captured
in your tiny pink purses.

You are such found things:
Many estranged souls,
unborns ticking
in blisters of heat.
Our own misremembered
Firelit tongues or
chambers of
caught songs.

And an infant globe,
in our palms, shows us
the vastness of things,
turmoil of the earth –
who knows what memory
is stored in its skin
like the tips
of my mother’s fingernails

opening, cleaving, intimate with you.