No high alert

 

I don’t have to close my eyes to see your face,

it’s in passing clouds, in each clod on the road,

it’s been outlined in the rise and fall of days –

as winters have frozen, as springs have thawed.

 

As summers have stormed in with their fangs bared,

as the lissom rains have twirled on the ground.

I hear your voice in the soft, whispered prayers

of the sea breeze in trees that it weaves around.

 

I don’t have to prime myself body and mind

I don’t have to take any extra care,

to sharpen my senses for symbols and signs.

Wherever I reach out blind – you’re always there.

 

However great the time and space we’re apart,

you’re with me still – nothing needs a high alert.

A scheduled post - because I'm on a short break in the Nilgiris but I'm reluctant to let anything disrupt the hard-fought fortnightly schedule of posting here. Fortnightly? is that archaic? I never see people use it, come across it anywhere in writing either, unless it's 'period' writing. Ennyway. I digress.

What I meant to write was that I'm quite unsure how to label this poem - all love poetry feels like something else too, to me - deeper than the glib labels words define. However, the lines have come about because of an old 1970s photo a childhood friend posted on a social media platform. I oohed and aahed over it, I'm a sucker for old snaps. It struck me later that I've managed to remain in contact somehow through all the intervening years with all the people captured in that photograph, though we each are continents apart at this exact moment and have been so through the major part of our individual lives. 

Should poems be labelled to reflect their source of inspiration? On a different note, isn't that - that I'm still able to be in touch with them - an ineffable blessing and a celebration deeper than words? 

Hope your month has begun well, have a wonderful July. 

A Worm's Perspective

 

IV.

If I had nine, and I was aware of that

number, exactly how many and their span -

I’d try some perspective, just like a cat.

I won’t do something just because I can.

I’ll leave the mountains to the mountaineers,

burrow deeper underground, try the dark,

for once stop equating light with crystal clear.

Try if the earth itself can strike the spark.

I’ll leave it to the birds - the clouds, the skies

and I’ll stick closer to the ground, as close

as the grass and the worm. Nothing king size

but the minutest I can curl to. My toes

crumbed by the soil, no flesh showing, not a hint.

And I’ll wait in all nine. For your footprints.

~^~*~^~

Last week, somewhere on my feed was this idea - love is the sure basis for a more equal, more just world. 

Universal love. The kind of love leaders, prophets and mystics speak about. Love thy enemy, because loving thy neighbour is no big deal after all, there's no virtue in loving what's familiar and therefore, not feared. Learning to love those we fear, now that's something that takes effort, application and discipline, we must get out of our own heads and get into their shoes - if successful, we're rewarded with a glimmer of understanding and compassion, even if we can't get to love. Love is the strongest force the world possesses. Love is a bridge to everything. Hate the sin, love the sinner. Every religion preaches it. Easily preached, near impossible to practice. 

But suppose, for the sake of argument, it were to become a reality, would it lead to social justice? Does love automatically lead to fairness? Are we always even handed with those we love?

And how do we hate the sin and love the sinner and be fair at the same time? The racists, the rapists, the paedophiles, the human traffickers, the swindlers, the gloating creators of unending human misery, the architects of monumental corporate frauds, the corrupt megalomaniac politicians who'll do anything, descend to the lowest level of remorseless dishonesty, to cling on to power - how is loving them going to bring about justice for the law-abiding, compassionate, open-minded citizenry, the non-toxic, non-haters who make up the quiet majority everywhere? 

I know this has strayed a bit from the kind of celebrations I had planned for this month over here, but still...I'm on topic even if somewhat at sea... 

Leftover happiness

There’s no forward, everything spins in curves

comes back to the same point and place,

what to do? no backward either, sideways,

the same coordinates,  and nothing swerves

an inch -  only the old sugar jar lid -

I spun it today, the thread broke, couldn’t screw

it back on. Not anything of value,

recycled - mayonnaise? jam? - to begin with,

but it came from somewhere that’s young, happy

the details of contents I’ve forgotten

long ago, just that the memories sweeten

the sugar. I suppose it’ll have to be

thrown away at last, it’s spinning useless -

just have to scoop out the last happiness.

Back in the couch/mouse potato mode and healing as per medical orders, everything went well and I am back at the usual inaction station. This concludes my celebration of the mundane.  

Personally Feb's been a challenging month all round, in fact so far year 2017 shows every sign of turning into a full blown annus horribilis type thingy. Fingers crossed March works out better. 

Celebrating festivals that aren't quite your own

In that city, it is easy to slip

into the pretence that you’ve never left home -

all along the lanes of the Island

and along the riverside

there’s the same mauve petal-foam

of the jacaranda tree,

the same flamboyant firesparks

the gulmohur shreds on the roads,

the stone built citadel, the pointed arch

in the crumbling ancient walls.

If you look away a moment

and look quickly back again

they exactly echo the ones in

the ruins of the mausoleum

next to your old schoolbus-stop.

Write...Edit...Publish : and a pair of empty shoes

Okay, so this is one of the last posts for the year 2015, which seems to have zoomed past faster than I could say Write…Edit…Publish, but it’s also a first.  And not in a good way.  I am travelling and cannot participate in one of my  favourite blogfests.  The first time that I am a no-show at WEP – just gutted! This post is a bloggish version of a pair of empty shoes, you know, like that march in Paris recently before the climate conference. I can't be here, but hey, here I am, right over here at WEP! 

This month it's all about Holiday Celebrations Out of This World, writing up Sci-Fi flashes are some of the coolest bloggers, among them Denise and Yolanda.  Go visit them and check out the entries, and jump in with your own if you like. Judging the writing contest will be the Ninja Captain of the blogosphere, Alex J Cavanaugh, the Sci-Fi maestro and best-selling author of the Cassa series.


My posts for WEP have usually been flash or poetry, all entirely imaginary. This time, to mark my absence, I am scheduling a different post, factual, no-nonsense non-fiction  - the empty shoes of my imagination alongside the WEP-ers.

Earthrise on Christmas 1968
Source:NASA

Happy Diwali 2011!

Let’s not think about how impermanent things are

How nerve-wracking and precarious, how bizarre

That a star with its silent bright glow

Doesn’t burn now, but burnt years ago

What’s behind that starshine for all we know

Maybe just the blackened mass of a stone-dead star.

Even the simplest moment is wrought so complex.

Living starpoints in my eyes, but up in space the wrecks,

The parts and dust of bodies that shone once

With a silent and a complicated radiance.

The light that takes an age to bridge this distance

And in so doing loses it source, which dies or disconnects.

If you insist I’ll reluctantly fall into that spiral.
Lead my thoughts that way, forget about keeping it simple

I’ll try and remember the lights that I see

A million stars in the sky, a lamp lit for Diwali

Most far beyond my grasp, wherever they may be.

Each beam lives while the source may be dead.  Each one a miracle.