once when i was reading on my kindle

my grandma came up to me and said

how can such a thin thing contain

such a fat book? and i said not just one book

but tens of thousands. she smiled and nodded

in the way she smiles and nods and went on

to water her plants.

i felt like an infidel holding a miracle

so casually, felt like a prophet to whom

grandma had revealed how we mistake

medium for message when it's just a matter

of compression of scale, how to play chicken-or-egg

with existence and essence is to solve algebra

with a history book, how a thing can contain

within it something more than itself, how a thing

can contain within it something that contains it,

how existence doesn't precede essence

but exceeds it, like clouds exceed water, gravity

exceeds matter, weather exceeds weather reports.

my grandma comes back with a dried bhindi

she will keep for its seeds, seeds that contain

within them the plant that contained them

(and here's a point that sartre overlooked

blinded by a bourgeois need for radical freedom)

even though the plant can and does exceed

the seed because it talks to the air and the water,

to the sky and the soil, to my grandma, and to me.

~ ajay

14/9/2022