P is for Passionate...Peerless...and Paz

Paz, Octavio (1914-1988) 

Today I am responding to a poem by Mexican poet Octavio Paz, a Nobel Laureate and a poet-diplomat, like Neruda. Paz was the Mexican ambassador to India during the sixties, and while there, influenced numerous writers/poets/artists of a Bengali cultural/literary movement called the Hungry Generation, the first post-colonial cultural movement in Bengal (which happens to be my home state).   Therefore, my connect with Paz when I first read him was immediate and deep, though I understood the reasons for that much later.  

My prompt for this entry is As One Listens to the Rain

As if it's timeless

Listen to me like deep afternoons when it seems

even doves have dozed off, and tiny petals fall

from the invisible, green flowers of the neem

silent and scentless against the garden wall

and a misguided cricket chirps in its crack

before its appointed time. A wheel barrow -

broken wood and rust - tumbled on its back

zithers like an echo in its shadow.

Your hand as transient as time and peace

trickles down my hair, angled collar bone

between mirage and mist, between breath and crease

of skin, cups a pulse as if it’s your own.

Listen to the pulse, the tempo of those tunes
as if it were timeless like these afternoons.

P is also for Politically correct.  Yesterday I came across a blog post which talked about Enid Blyton's books, how they were no longer acceptable now, that some people find them objectionable and not reflective of our current society and values. I derived enormous enjoyment from those books, and feel there's nothing wrong with current generations reading them, provided we explain the changes that have happened. Should these books with gender and racial stereotypes be read now, or should they be scrapped?

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2015.