August evening

 

Image credit : Pixabay

The street lights, for some reason, aren’t on today

and in the dark, even rain comes on tiptoes

the traffic’s still gridlocked beneath the windows 

but it’s quieter, because light has got a way

to amplify sound. One streetful of darkness

has dialled down urban angst and calmed the restless.

 

The balcony here  wears no trellised shadows

no umbras, penumbras of leaves filigreed

against the walls – those arabesque patterns need

a strong light, a municipal lamp that glows

at railing height. No one’s willing to disturb

this chiffon silence, the cars crawl past the kerb.

 

The streetlights  haven’t been switched on this evening

a minor malfunction, human or machine

a sensor perhaps that hasn’t signalled green.

Some epiphanies only darkness brings,

that light fails to show. A small error has led

to a darkened lane, cars going past muted.

I've been reading more than I've been writing  - old favourites in poetry, where even if the eyes get a bit blurry, the lines are known so one can do without crystal clear anything, recognise the words from their shapes on the page anyway. 

Edna St Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Auden, Neruda, Yeats -  the all time smash hits. Mary Oliver and Maya Angelou, of course. Some Mahmoud Darwish, top of mind right now because of the conflict. 

Some children's poetry as well, Eletelephony is guaranteed to cheer me up every time. I love Escape at Bedtime and this one of Shel Silverstein too. Escape from the doom and gloom in the blink of an eye. What is your favourite children's poem? Do you have any favourites? What do you read when you get exhausted with the headlines? 

Inexplicit, 29th January

 

Your love wasn’t given in lunch box notes,

wasn’t nailed to the bed in a stocking.

It was in a firmly buttoned raincoat

a calm hand offered crossing the Ring road.

It didn’t really set much store by talking.

 

Your love wasn’t given in countable stuff,

in branded clothes and trainers, themed décor.

It was there in the knock when I had stayed up

late into the night, in the abrupt ‘enough’

at the thin line of light under my door.

 

It was given in ways so unobtrusive –

in the kneading of dough, in workaday hands

on the wheels - showing how to love and live

without words making it threadbare explicit –

unnoticed, but quite easy to understand.

Yesterday was my parents' wedding anniversary, so...My February and celebration of love starts end January and continues till 29th Feb which is my father's birthday (marked on 1st March on non-leap years). 

Though I have to confess that I am not much for Valentines and such myself, I am more into the idea that love is to be celebrated at every opportunity, 24/7. It's just that I don't like the Indian right wing going around brandishing their weird morality meter and thrusting it down everybody's throat. Valentine's Day is a western import like many other things and it's up to each individual how s/he will express their love, whether through western imports or eastern traditions or whatever. Get thee behind us pronto, the Indian Taliban! The erosion of women's rights in the last few years is truly unbelievable and being carried out in insidious ways. 

Anyways, I digress. One of the things that floated into my mind yesterday as I was thinking of my parents is that how memories of death tend to overshadow those of the life lived. I struggle to dissociate the isolated last few years and terribly painful, lonely deaths my parents went through, from the long years of happier, more pleasant times they had with each other, with me and with their wider families. 

Their deaths were marked by my physical absence but I was, due to technology, able to witness nearly all of their struggle right up to the very last, for which I am thankful and no mistake. Because from my pov, the alternative would have been even more unbearable. But from theirs, I was not present at the deathbed and not able to offer any comfort. That has skewed my grief with a whole heap of complex emotions and it is not an easy process to untangle this. But the untangling is necessary if I'm to stop defining their life only in terms of their deaths. My father grieved my mother alone in complete isolation for 11 months. He lived for 89 years, fully active for 85 till a stroke made him housebound. That's a good measure of happiness to offset against a year of difficult dying, terrible as it is. Each must be given its due weightage. I'm learning to do that and be thankful for this too. 

As a family, we didn't talk much about emotions, though we talked a lot about other things, my mother especially wasn't a silent person. My father, once he retired, talked and wrote about his childhood in his ancestral village, his life in towns and cities in India growing up and working. Overall, they weren't a touchy feely generation, they had seen too much hardship when young - the partition, the wars, the famine, the communal violence, their own uprooting and relocations forced by circumstances, the untimely, shocking losses in the family. It had squeezed the sentimentality out of them I think, but made them into quietly, deeply loving people. I celebrate them and their ways of loving and I'm determined that somewhere, someday, I'll be able to to do that without their deaths clouding my memories of their life. 

Q & A

What colour's your poem? she asked.

I said,

mostly blues and greens, some yellow, some red.

Like twilight - maybe a shade of lilac –

some of it fluorescent, some grey and drab

and some parts dissolved small town mud track,

silvered power cuts with a few dabs

of starshine.  Lost fishhooks on dry riverbeds,

waving heat haze and groundnut pyramids.

Some lines white, some unavoidably black.

What colour is your poetry? 

I replied,

some quite see-through, like rainfall on the wide

lit savannahs, on which the long grass feeds

and grows its shadow, neat corn-rowed mornings,

windows missing louvres of glass. Low-speed

smiles, bright swimsuits flashing in the hot springs

in deep forest. The negative space between

points of bison horns, the dragon fly sheen

of streams. And some as opaque as safekeeping.