[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Alex—

Beautifully evocative of Indian art and religion.

One syntactic nit and a few metric ones:
1. The syntax in S2L2-3 stumped me: “Her spirit soars beyond minaret prayers,/ Where Jatayu’s once grieved in sunlit streams, . . .”. Jatayu’s what? Spirit or prayers?
2. The meter in S1L3 is a bit bumpy. You could make it smoother by dropping “Like” and replacing the comma at the end of S1L2 with either an em-dash or a colon to make the simile a metaphor.
3. In S2L2, replacing “minaret” with “ the muezzin’s” makes the meter smoother.
4. In S2L4, you have a few extra syllables. How about something like: “The pigeons swirl dawn’s air in saffron layers.” ?

I notice that you mix Hindu images (Garuda, Jatayu , Krishna) with Islamic ones (minaret, ghazal, jaali).
In S4 your reference to the courtyard “where old faiths embrace” suggest a harmonious tolerance between Hindus and Muslims when in reality the two faiths were more often at odds, eventually requiring the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. I wasn’t sure if you intended to explore this conflict.

Glenn