Rohit Nalluri

I'd frequent the stone-hewn temples of old
and listen to all they'd say.
They'd point to a God of stone in His hall,
to Him they'd ask me to pray.

In time I learnt to carry the peace
beyond the temple doors.
Outside the sky was burnt and blue and
birds were out in force!

When you give a thing a place and a name
you kill what it might have been.
A templed God is a bounded one
with little skin in the game.

So the mountains are my temple now,
now this is where I pray.
I choose to witness a living god - 
the singing ocean spray.

The scriptures, the cross and the plaza of stone,
these are symbols; Gods of a kind.
I worship that which nourishes nature,
that which gives birth to the mind,
like sunlight through the mesh
of crisscrossed fingers of leaves.
No God exists of stone or flesh
that I could really believe.

My god is in the largest things,
it is in the beings small.
My soul demands my god to be
everything | nothing | all.