Ashless

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~ Leonard Cohen

It burns intense, and it also burns slow -

great heat, a sheer blue flame, finely haloed

but it yields nothing, no ash, minimal glow

and there’s no charred heap once it’s out, no broad

smear on soil from which meanings can be clawed.

Yes, it’s poetry, that tiny rimmed blue leap,

that transparent smoke with its musky smell

though it leaves no trace of itself in the sweep

of its own wide dispersal.  Hard to tell,

to tease out the proof that it’s burning well.

Because that quote from Cohen just took my brain in its jaws this morning and worried it like a big cat with its prey.

Anything hollow

Flames are rarely flame-shaped; winds put them out

or stretch them into long licks of tongues, rude
and pert; squash them with fear; force them to brood
crouched low, trembling under stars. Slap them about,
make them gulp. Fluttering hearts against mouths
of open darkness. Coerce servitude
as they want – wilful, arbitrary.  Skewed
and sharp gusts brushing past from north to south.

 

So, I never see the tents come alight

with the right tear-drop flames, row after row;
there is nothing to see, hardly a spark
to my festivity; sit content, quiet;
my lamp too is no lamp, but anything hollow
filled with oil and a wick burns in the dark.




It is Diwali night.  Back in India, my hometown and every home would be draped in lights, sparkling with fireworks and noisy with loud crackers and hissing rockets, quite deafening.  I am in a different place, and here it's impossible to light the traditional oil-lamps, even if I had them as it is too windy for unprotected flames.  So my Diwali consists of a single brass lamp lit inside my room, and silence, and peace and poetry. And that feels uncommonly good and right. Happy Diwali to you if you're celebrating.


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