Tunat'ya'va

"Bullah: tu ki haasil kita, je yaar na rakhiya raazi?"

(I have been unfaithful, I fear,

To you, and

To your memory.

Memory has its failings,

Sight no less.)

After a time, I lost sight of you.
I saw only a story -
A shadow of a shape
Clad in your skin
Smiling your smile
That I would love to love.

My stories are strange things,
So easily defined, so easily defied,
Lives shifting like the seas,
Truths flowing through lies,
Lies I would love to live,
Lives I would love to love.

My stories are my lives,
Playing out, before my eyes,
Shifting with each sign I read,
Shifting with each sigh I hear,
They shift with all I learn,
With all I learn to love.

My stories are my hopes,
For lives more fully lived,
For lessons learned in time,
For loves not unfulfilled,
My stories carry all my dreams,
My stories carry all my love.

(Ah, but where, you ask

Does that leave you?

Sight may shift, hopes may shift,

Lives shift always, but you

Are real, nonetheless.)

I loved you once, I know,
Or perhaps I love you still -
Or perhaps, one day I will -
But do I love you enough,
To see you, see through the stories,
That I so love to love?

You ask, and my stories melt away,
It is no great task -
I knew those lives were lies,
I knew which loves were lies,
And which not. What remains,
Is no story. Only
A question:

I have been unfaithful, my love,

To you, yet 

I have faith in our story.

Will you, for all my failings,

Have faith in me, no less?

For love! If you and I

Could with faith conspire,

To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,

Would we not shatter it to bits! - And then - 

Remould it nearer to our hearts' desire.

* The opening line is Bulleh Shah - "What have you achieved, if you have kept not faith with your own?"

* The closing lines are Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1st edition, verse 73), but writing "faith" for "Fate".

* Tunat'ya is Hopi Algonquin - "active hope". The Hopi believe all events exist in potential, and come to manifest through the hopes of those who would see them appear. A Tunat'ya'at is a gathering where the tribe tells stories of what they hope will come to pass, and in the telling, make that reality manifest. "Tunatya'va" is "one who hopes" - a dreamer, an aspirant, a storyteller, a reader of the future.