Breathless

Credit

I’ve read somewhere – a prophet spent

forty days in the wilderness.

A pair of brothers were absent

for fourteen years more or less.

In strange, nested mythologies,

passages marked in sands and wars.

And in here-n-now territories

time buckles under tormentors.

I heard the empty vessels wreck

my world, too close their keels and teeth.

Saw too, a knee pressed on a neck

and shut my eyes, forgot to breathe.

The mills, I’ve heard, grind small but slow –

how many more aeons to go?

Kinship

Flamingoes off the Sitra Causeway in Tubli Bay, Nabih Saleh, Bahrain

The winters pass looking for flamingo pink;

at the pulsing lights on the skin of the bay;

the runners on track, their devices gleaming,

the weekend traffic clogs the six-lane causeway.

Many will come to spot the flamingos

and watch for the shimmer of sodium lights

the peak traffic’s slow, but it comes and goes

and birds are still lost in protected sites.

From Tubli and Arad to the Bay of Bengal

in circles and loops of strange radii

again and again to the sounds of birdcalls,

to the flamingo pink, with a pink rimmed eye.

The kinship of migrants, a kinship of pink,

the kinship of all transient, fragile things.

Unstarry night over Arad Bay. Actually, it was a full moon y'day. 

Elaborate

When I left my father’s house the first time

there was no elaborate leave-taking

of this tree, that pet fawn, that other vine.

It had to be done quick and clean, no aching

memory beads colour-sorted in straight lines;

just a single snap and the twig breaking

raw and free, oozing a transparent slime

between blood and tears, nothing epoch-making.

I still leave homes that are not mine, and yet

they feel like they are, they twist dancing knives

and sharp star-barb diamonds, oh elaborate

the farewells I must take! onionskins of lives

fall apart at first cut, and the consummate

traveller knows zilch who leaves or arrives.