Four quarters of the day

The newspaper collector comes around with his harsh call

shattering the humid Sunday morning beyond my wall
a couple of rickshaws lazily twirl their conjoint wheels
and a sudden squeeze on their lo-tech honker feels
like the televisual scream of dying birds that tumble and fall
plummeting from the sky in a strident cosmic drawl.

The noon comes veiled, in the guise of some evening

when the light turns murky well before it’s time to bring
each hour of the day together in neat pleats and tuck
them into the waistband of the sun, and to chuck
this neutral light over her left shoulder, splitting
the day from dark and the twilight’s final fling.

The traffic peaks by habit at the appointed hours

even during holidays, the hollow concrete towers
disgorge their inmates for the mandatory merry
making, a bigwig’s white car cruises, her red cherry
sits flush on her roof, the inmate sits flushed in flowers
torn and strewn around her even as her public sours.

The night is poor in stars and silence, to sleep and fade

is surely wasteful, when there is so much to be made?
A prescribed life must stay wide awake and urbanity
equals unblinking sodium eyes of a frantic sleepless city
and I too, urbane insomniac, lazily parade
my goblet held high on my terrace and arcade.

Touch

I feel your touch on my nape

across the room; when the shape

of the shadows change, and the doorway there

frames your silhouette.  The light flares

into a precious dimness like never before

when you block the light-stream at that door.

Haven’t you felt mine?  Haven’t you known

the same lightness at your collarbone?

each time I shared the same space

my fingers on your face

like soft rain on the sea

soaking into anonymity.

Touch me here again and make me flare

into dimness, into rain, into anonymously rare.

Rusty coins

Half of love is squandered on unworthy things

and the other half still kept aside for special use
through the break the years fall, and fall the springs
what’s gone is gone, and what’s left slowly devalues
the currency of love rusts, the coins aren’t shining
they glow only when they’re spent, and rot in disuse.

The migrant birds that fly out with the white tipped wings

in torn chevrons sharp against the twilight blues
they seem too common to deserve any special loving
their flights too routine, predictable, to amuse
the same mundane motifs repeat at all beginnings
and end without any drama over which to enthuse.

The grasses grow deep, at the horizon the evenings

bloom into a purple darkness, in ones and twos
the stars come in, a chiffon white moon sliver swings
up between the limbs of trees, but resolves no issues
these too are just ordinary, none of them brings
out that special love, there’s nothing to choose.

And so love is picky, and so inevitably the pickings

get slimmer and slimmer while it fusses and reviews
what it can afford to throw away, and what it’s keeping
it ends up too self-absorbed, and easy to confuse
And so it loses both halves of itself and there is nothing
left in its hands except rusty coins, and residues.

Only one road

The dawn breaks a little early, and so do I

whatever little I possess is strewn around
like headstones in a graveyard no-one comes by
sinking softly and slowly down into the ground

I have bought fresh offerings, the shredded

petals and sandal, clarified the fat
into a clear honey, readied for the dreaded
long night journey down into combat

The journeys break a little early, and so do I

not in one spectacular twist of bone and sinew
red fountains of marrow spurting up high
but bit by bit without a complete breakthrough

The dawn breaks a little early with a mist under the dome

there may be a thousand roads but only one leads me home

Inexact, diffuse and deep

Because all my losses weren’t exact

I didn’t think to mourn, or weep
they couldn’t be summed in one neat fact

Days keep them private, and time is backed

thrust into work but can only creep
because all my losses weren’t exact

Friends handle my house with muted tact

and tiptoe around where memories sleep
they couldn’t be summed in one neat fact

The smoke from sorrow isn’t easily tracked

but it’s wrong that diffuse can’t be deep
because all my losses weren’t exact

Nothing at all has shattered on impact;

for they don’t crash, just that they seep
they couldn’t be summed in one neat fact

There’s little left with which to transact

life with its sale of laughter and grief
Because all my losses weren’t exact
they couldn’t be summed in one neat fact.

Lovers' Cove Challenge : Coffee?

Lovers' Cove set a writing challenge, which you can read about at  http://apd-loverscove.blogspot.com/   I continue from Crystal's thought

Challenge #2

Word count: 30

She looked thoughtful, ” I barely know you, yet  there is a connect.  It’s odd, I’m not normally like this.  We need to talk this over a coffee.  Coming? ”

Ghazal : Take my hand

I’ve got no flashy lamps to light, come take my hand

Touch trades off for lack of insight, come take my hand

I don’t know if we’ll tread upon marshlands or common cobblestones
but we will go in together, upright, come take my hand

Anywhere you fall I’ll set you straight and I take it you’ll reciprocate
and once in a while be grasped too tight, come take my hand

Walk the miles with me, or choose to stay, the trip’ll get over either way
It’s not measured in length or width or height, come take my hand

Love’s a risk, and so is friendship we each know this about all the trips
the way is dark but the reward’s bright, come take my hand

Dark needn’t be something to fear, when it’s dark and the skies are clear
that’s when the stars come alive, alight, come take my hand

Forget the common metaphors, the stereotypes that reinforce
light’s always clarity. That’s also trite, come take my hand

Fields

War is not the only arena where peace is done to death ~ Aung San Suu Kyi, at her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

It’s true that war isn’t the only battlefield

where peace is stabbed to death, shred

into pieces by missiles, it’s also peeled

off by gentle hands and torn stone dead

every day in closed cells and sealed

yards, small rooms and the sweep of widespread

placid nods of automated heads.

 

 

And prisons too come in myriad forms

tightly curled buds, cells, walls, snug cocoons.

All life must constantly escape its homes

constantly force open the petals of fortunes

and sail on unknown winds, transform

painfully, trim, hack and prune

and all the same, die all too soon.

There is the life of prisons far away
and there’s life on a different plane
but violence filed in both their dossiers
repeated exercises of mechanical pain
hope and faith are so easy to mislay
when peace is shelled and shot again and again
in all-pervasive, relentless campaigns.

There are deaths on battlefields, and foetuses

strangled in wombs and quickly disposed
or else unborn still, taught clever bypasses
to adult war formations that closed
about warriors aeons ago. We repeat all the losses,
no lessons are learnt, no hostilities paused
only time and technicalities transposed.

Rummaging in the drawer

I came upon an old love poem of yours

the date on the page said you loved me then
as you do now, but I hadn’t read it before
had I done so, I wouldn’t have forgotten

you write them still, but now it’s a different ink

it flows freer, and has a quicker drying time
while the other was an uncertain thing
halting heartfelt words dressed up in garish rhyme

it was like coming upon a picture of your face

an old monochrome batch of tender childhood
pert innocence, perhaps touched with just a trace
of bluster, before it showed the colours of fortitude.

it made the morning flinch, suddenly poignant

as it placed your youth in my old hands thus
and showed that love, even when it is constant
changes into different forms of precious.

Beloved, you are

the constant river in my heart, you are the one

who can wrest my formless shadow from the light
and fill it in with the details of a reflection;

you show me the pools of greed and grief and slight
in my eyes, you tell me that it is more than just a shape,
a darker form of darkness that dogs me day and night;

you are the river, your waves are the ones who drape
the merciless sawteeth of rocks  with waterfalls
smoothing the edge of chaos in the mindscape;

from the secret crevice to where the mangrove sprawls

you run unstoppable as a stream of molten metal,
your oxbows a moat around my defenceless walls;

minds fly, and restless feet, but you can calmly settle

into the course, and effortless, flow over every trial;
treat sharp oar stabs the same as falling petals.

I know you are the river, it’s so foolish and futile

these endless quibbles over names – Ganga, Niger or Nile.

This post is part of the Blog hop Saturday hosted by Andy David.  Read more about that at http://thoughtsofbeautyinthestillnessofdawn.blogspot.com/2012/06/blog-hop-saturday-linkup-2-06022012.html

The vapours of your words rise up

The vapours of your words rise up, steam in what I read,

In every lively music, every crumbling manuscript of loss
In every hand raised in protest, every newsfeed.
Wherever I turn a page, however far I travel across.
All convoluted streets wherever they may lead
Smiling in malicious glee as their numbers close
About me in tightening circles, unwilling to concede
A single needle-point of space for anything I compose,
They bring me back again and again to that same old place
Where the puddles shimmered with the faint reflections of your face.

There are no codes that anyone can make or call their own.

Even the ones that came before and wrote what they did
The point to all their myriad points seems only to be drawn
When you finally speared your pieces, their bodies slim, heads lucid.
All the tyre-treads etched in asphalt, every cobblestone
That thuds down the steep tumbles of alleys, every ruined pyramid
Leads me back to the labyrinth of hilltops in the dawn
Back into the chequerboard fields, the fizzy paddy green grid,
Laid out like torn pages of the poems I once saw you write
The letters a bit blotched by the rain, the meanings heaving upright.

Lovers' Cove May Link Up

Andy David initiated a brilliant poetry link up session called Lovers' Cove. He gave us his first line which can be read at http://apd-loverscove.blogspot.com/2012/05/lovers-cove-challenge-1-05262012.html.

I continue from the last entry which is Diwakar’s and my line after his is...

But later, a velvety-sudden blue love-lotus rises again on the ebb of wrath

http://apd-loverscove.blogspot.com

Seeing red

I read the news, see gulmohurs cascade
their blossoms in a glorious spring red
I brew the coffee, I remake the bed
in the same half-hearted half-latte shade.

Spring repeats, the sheets of petals fall

again and again but the colours remain true
and here inside there is also nothing new
the usual violence, and the winner takes all.

I watch the news, see untold lives cascade

away in inflorescences of shocking red
I brew the coffee, and they count their dead
and that’s how nations, and my news, is made.

Let’s not talk about rights and righteousness.

Do you want your coffee with more sugar or less?

Rubaiyat: respectfully yours

I have learnt yours off by heart and recited

each one of them outside and inside my head
till the domes of skulls were shaped with their echoes
and spines curved to hold the words they said

Your moving finger has crept down centuries

touched pawns and queens, and great pens and keys
and touched me too sitting in the darkness
with my hair lifting slightly in the breeze

Then there are those, whose delicate rubaiyat

I forget, at least, can’t recall the details of their art
but they get mixed in with the mortar of life
and they are in the paving of the path.

And sometimes I’m caught quite unawares

as to what I read, whether it’s yours or theirs
all words seem to blend in at the source
into one great poem, echoing everywhere.

It rained in Giza! and on the prints

I.

It’s already midday where they are, and my dawn

here is speckled with rain, drunken birdsong
and children’s laughter.  Moisture’s suddenly on
my hair, and beaded in places it doesn’t belong.

And the lotusprints I’d talked about the other day?

already made something less, I can hardly see
where the men had stopped, and then moved away
from my door, away from all that’s mine and me.

Their soles left marks because most of the yard

was unkempt, silksoft earth’s my garden.
Men leave no footprints where the soil is hard
or lush flowers bend under their own burden.

Oddly holy-looking lotusmarks by my door

Wiped out by a holier rain. Not there anymore.

II.

You too must have heard the stories just like me

faintly sacred, without pinning their exact source -
some tramp comes to the door, then turns to be
an evil tempered brahmin without any remorse;

the old, stooped man who came to the saint’s lone cell

and he washed the gnarled feet, and to his awe
under the dirt were twin wounds he knew too well
to admit any doubt about what he saw.

You know the stories, the almost-myths and tales of old

the holyfolk who came in their humble guise
and touched a life and so changed it manifold
and you bear in mind what a knock at the gate implies.

Of course there are myths too hard to believe.

But you check their feet when they come. And when they leave.

III.

So you burn the lamps and keep any wicks trimmed

low and straight, so that your flame is a shapely blue
at its lowest point when the light is finally dimmed;
and you pare the breeze for its secret haiku.

You give a guarded welcome to the destitute,

the tramps and holy men, wonder who they are -
prophets or kings in disguise over some dispute
and you watch their feet for any unusual scar;

and yet they come and leave, and only when they’re gone

you notice their footprints - a sacred lotus mark
and then it rains a little in the desert, just at dawn
on the two-faced join of the light and dark.

It's a gift, this sudden relief of unexpected rain

but it means that the lotusprints can’t remain.

IV.

And so the vague sacredness that comes your way

leaves you too, unbeknownst, and a precious rain
washes it off, its faintest trace, spatters it away
in a brief dance of sand and liquid, a different stain

marks the garden now, a shallow wetness of the earth

not enough to even pucker the air with its smell
but there’s a sense of loss, though the exact worth
of lotusprints against desert rain is hard to tell.

Much of the morning is spent in futile rehash

should you have looked more carefully at the sleeping sole?
A little more mindful and this sudden splash
of rain would fall but still leave the footprints whole.

The rain’s dry now, the morning chores are almost done

as you think - will there be another lotus one?

V.

I do know exactly where you are coming from

we of the complex-simple life, a little out of touch
with soles and tales, who guardedly welcome
tramps without reflecting too long or too much.

We of the easily forgiven mistakes, the casual slips -

looking at the wrong side of feet of an unknown guest
just a resting point for holy men on their trips
touched once, and then brushed aside at the best.

And even the marks that we would hold as souvenirs

washed off by a shower where there’s never a drop of rain,
every cosmic sign and slight made amply clear
each snub a blessing so that we can never complain.

We know this too, if there’s a second chance, a repeat -

it won’t be a lotus, or it won’t be on the feet.

VI.

It’s past dusk where I am, and the brief dawn rain

has left not a single sign for its twilit twin
a dry sky, an empty garden, another mundane
day draws to its dry close, and a night begins

I remember to turn on the lights by the gate

in case a mystic man should decide to stop
but just like you, I know that it’s a futile wait
brushed twice by holiness is too much to hope.

As I turn back I notice the desert has bloomed -

a small blade of green, probably a weed
not a lotus, or a rose, nothing perfumed
just the first shoot of a long forgotten, hidden seed.

And I can’t be troubled to find out if this blade has grown

As a gift or snub, enough that it’s here when the prints are gone.