Biodegradable and eco-friendly

Am I being organic enough

Biodegradable enough? soothing green
In all my relationships of love -
Can they decay quick and clean
Without any sediments in the routine?

Are things kept pollution free

Have effluents met all standards?
The spectrums of love the required purity
The brightness of my words
Quicksilver sharp but filtered.

Then why is there a landfill out

In gaudy colours, plastic hues?
Stick figure rag-pickers moving about
Stabbing at the ache of residues,
If I’ve done the work and checked the flues?

The strangest thing

I love the flowers that carpet the spring  
But here's the nub, and it's the strangest thing
That when the winter strips it ruthlessly bare
It can't strip the love, that still remains there.

Season's change, the colours flush and fade
The green and copper by orderly turn cascade
But here's the nub, and it's weird and strange
The colour of love quite refuses to change.

And here's another oddest thought to think
The fullness of harvests into harsh winters sink
Hollow and bitter and cold, but here's the nub
Strangely, no bitterness touches the love.

The planet, whatever colour it chooses to wear
Branches might dance in lace or choose to go bare
But here's the nub, and this might be the strangest
Whatever the routine, it just seems the best.

Oh, I love the flowers that dress up the earth
When they are no more, I love the undressed dirt
And I love the dirt churned into mud by rains
But here's the nub, mud dries, love remains.

I have loved each flower as well as its thorn
And those that have never a flower borne
And I found it strange, but this here's the nub
The bearing of either did not impact on love.

Why poetry makes a great subject to blog about

Compass, champagne corks, and straws

Everyone has their own choice of weapons with which they face the world and cut it into manageable portion sizes.  Mine happens to be poetry, what’s yours?  I grew up thinking of reading as an arsenal against the world as well as a champagne cork to pop at every celebration.  And poetry is the straw and also the compass I clutch at as I drift through life’s vast oceans.

So, does poetry make a good subject for a blog?  Yes, it does and here are my 5 top reasons:

 Brief and punchy

The first tip that an expert gives a newbie is to keep it brief, between 300-1000 word count for each blog post. Well, what else can make a point as pithily as a well turned quatrain? One of Shakespeare’s famous sonnets totes up less than 120 words, and you could probably edge in a poem of epic proportions at a word count of 1000. Like this one for instance.  Poetry fits into the pared down précis world of 420 word counts and 140 characters like nothing else can. Here's another example.

Trendy

Poetry deals with themes that are always in demand – love, sex, hormones, happiness, loss, grief, mindfulness, spirituality, beauty, humour, work and play, you name it, there’s a poem about it.  And you could always add your own take on each of them, they’re not likely to go out of fashion anytime soon.  Poems and rhymes encapsulate the collective wisdom and “how to .... in 3 steps” for a vast range of subjects.  In short and sweet verses, just the right byte size to nibble at during a coffee break.  Intense but short attention-span reading.  Nothing quite like it.

Convulse the SE’s now, go on

Strangely enough, traffic and search terms need not have anything remotely to do with the actual content that’s written, only the labels and headers that the SE’s can pick up on their radars. For instance, someone may have written a perfectly innocuous and deeply profound poem about a war-ravaged topsy-turvy world and then called it “The Second Coming”; and no guesses on how the SE’s gleefully O that for the kind of search terms that make toes curl.  Or your blood curdle, alternatively.  But hey, that gets the traffic moving, right?  Poetry has a lot of potential that way.

Bring them on!

How many people do you know that are voracious readers? Oh, loads of course.  Okay great, now how many of these people bought a book of poems in the last year?  None, or maybe a couple, right? Poetry is simply not a wildly popular genre as compared to the rest.  It’s a small niche, and as more and more poets find recognition and publishers, there are ever more books competing for the attention of the same readership.  The Internet on the other hand is a cost effective and far-reaching medium.   There is no reason for readers to avoid creative writing on the net, if good content is available online.  In fact, it can be used to broaden and create new readers as well.  So yes to blogging the poetry, no to rigidly sticking to just one method. 

Lo salt alternative

One thing I keep hearing is that how I shouldn’t take everything I read on the net as gospel truth. 

“Don’t take it seriously, a large pinch of salt is a mandatory addition,“ my more net savvy friends tell me with raised and wagging fingers, ”Just because a page has a half a million views a month doesn’t make the information accurate.” 

“Lies, damn lies and statistics, most of ‘em,” another one tells me, “Check the sources.” 

Really? I always thought people went to the net for information, Google being the modern day Jeeves, no? 

“What are you, insane? Only .gov and .this, .that and .other are reliable, the rest is bs.” 

Well, a poem does not convey facts and since it's imaginary there need not be any disclaimers about accuracy or the lack thereof.  Writing a poem doesn’t require reams of research, and reading it doesn’t require you to be on some information red-alert either.  It only needs for one side to feel it and be able to communicate, and the other side to read it and enjoy it.  Easy write, easy read.  No salt or seasoning mandatory.  Read it, shut it, forget it.  Or not, as you like.




 

Stalking the alleys

I.

The wind maims the sky with dust. An old woman

Refuses to be photographed, instead insists I buy
Fat lemons dripping yellow from her basket.  The question
Is well-thumbed but hard to fathom still. “Caravanserai?
Mish fahima. Wikala yani?...mesh, shimaal.”*  One more try
At capturing her face against the yellow of the lemons.
Foiled, once more. “La, madame.” The wind, a dust-scratched sky
And resolute refusal standing in for omens.

The left lane’s narrow, many days of dust lodge

In the lines between cobbles.  Deserted after the turn.
Is my person safe, are my things? There’s just one guy
Blowing at a charcoal fire. A sudden smudge
A sharp spiked shadow of petty, personal concern
Under a faded awning flapping against the sky.


II.

 The lane meets another, widens; and clumps of men

And lone, possibly unemployed, their eyes listless,
Sit sipping tea to keep hands busy with some option.
A group of university students animatedly discuss
If the country’s got into a hodgepodge of political mess
Or just an economic one and if that’s so, then
Which spring green step to prioritise? The exact focus
Needed to secure the sky and deserted alleyways again.

The wind has whipped their hair into fluid haloes

Around their heads. The break in talk is quite abrupt
At my presence.  Jaws harden a little, perhaps hostile.
Is a foreigner who’s not a tourist welcome now? No-one knows.
Old rules of warmth, are they to be broken or kept?
A revolution swats at tiny transactions of lifestyle.

III.

 
Their manners impeccable, their faces tender, eyes chill
They show me the way readily enough, no disrespect
Creases the border of coldness. Nothing’s changed, but still
Not one of us on either side knows what to expect
Circumstances set up their own insidious codes of conduct
Fit monumental changes into the trivial drill
Of daily tasks. Of getting through small, moral dilemmas. How to direct
A foreign woman on the streets with time to kill.
 
The path ahead narrows again, an archway and then
The lane an unlit off-white candle tapers into the gloom
The doorway seems much further than I’d thought
Should I turn back? Or press on forward again?
Between the two, there is hardly any room
To manoeuvre, and I am squeezed and caught.


IV.

 Maybe it was sound advice after all, given somewhere –

Those stern directives of stay-at-home-crime’s-on-the-rise.
Perhaps it’s indecent to ogle, come out and avidly stare
At history being made. The whole enterprise
Undignified. To stalk the alleys without averting eyes
From jobless youth swallowing their tea of despair.
Vaguely voyeuristic.  No use the repeated cries
About solidarity and you-don’t-know-how-much-I-care.
 
Feet have a way of marching on while the brain’s
Busy unravelling complications and their intricate motives.
The edifice is here with its huge vaulted portal.
Deserted but for the guides, and the remains
Of an artist’s painting.  The nation outlives
Revolutions and petty voyeurs. Stoic.  Immortal.


V.

Walls are good sometimes.  Walls are the only barrier

Blocking listless eyes.  An ancient room in a merchant inn
Now a studio, where the artist’s left pieces of his career
Hung on walls, and incomplete on the easel. A guarded grin
Of dried up colours still smears his palette, a possible skin
On muddy water in a blue ceramic cup left for the voyeurs
To peer at and see their own tentative reflections in.
The whole in photogenic disarray, colourful yet severe.

The mocking laugh of red on green, the scream of banshee blues

Still carry on the protests here as do the street graffiti
The subjects are traditional, old archways, carpet-sellers, the usual.
Only a trembling line, suppressed emotions give away the clues
And bring in silently what’s being discussed in the city.
The heated talk of young men, and a lemon-seller’s refusal.



*Caravanserai? I don't understand. You mean the merchant inn? Okay, go left.

La - no.





Sometimes events shift the co-ordinates of familiar places and they must be re-explored from entirely different perspectives.  This one,  posted sometime back, is based on an amalgamation of events and walks in the Islamic Old City after the Revolution.

 

Linked to Open Link Night @ dVerse

Inspired, and also a little scared, birthday wishes

Sometime back I had posted a poem by Irene Rutherford on my fb wall – “Is Love then, so simple”. Here it is again.  I could read it a million times and not get enough! Its brevity and punch are just amazing.  Irene would have been right at home in today’s twitter world I think, and I don’t mean that in any frivolous way, only this poem was published 1920.  Anyways, it generated a lot of likes as is obvious it should, my father read it and commented that he should like to see something as profoundly simple and powerful as this someday, with my name written on it.  Scary! but I wanted to give it a shot.

This week is my father’s birthday, his 80^th and 20^th simultaneously.  This is for you, Baba.  My rejoinder to Irene.  As simple and honest as I can be.  Happy birthday!

Must it always be so clear

What love is, and isn't?

Understanding get so sheer

That it can be envisioned.

The more I've loved, the more I've lost

The will to define things.

For you - clear vistas crossed.

For me, the indistinct.

As I sit still, and it gets less -

My share of eternity -

The more I feel it's hard to guess

What love has meant to me.

And since I am on some kind of bare-all spree here in this post, I might as well record that end of January is my parent's wedding anniversary. And end-Feb is my father's birthday, so February has always been my very own personal month to celebrate and reflect on love in its myriad forms, Valentine or no.  Or should I say, reflect and celebrate a little more intensely, because really, there are eleven more months to think about and celebrate it.

Nowhere

There is no place where it’s just you and me

Nowhere where a trail of triviality doesn’t crowd
Us out of our conjoint selves, split into tawdry
Companies of millions.  Nowhere is it allowed

That I should draw the cloak of your stillness

About my shoulders, drop the thin wispy wrap
Of noiseless raging chaos that always surrounds us.
That I should leave my hands idle in your lap.

The frenzied skipping of  gold sunlight on silver

The mad rush of the storm whipping up sands
Mimics the mindless movements of my fingers
Mimics my mindless minds and mindless hands.

No place where it’s just me and you, my quiet nails
Fallen like moonlit leaves on your skin, their curve
Gentle, the veins obscured and fuzzy, no details
Getting past the swell of their slight, flushed reserve.

The endless chatter of birds stepping up to a crescendo.
Reflections of ropes and rigging quivering up into the skies
The swish of lanes into old cars, the swinging innuendo
In tail lights blinking on and off against the rise

Of polished tarmac, the sheen of animal print rosettes
Screaming dark within a low slung evening cloud.
No place where I can curl into you and forget
A hundred shreds of interruptions.   Raucous and loud.

Valentine: More than I care to admit

It so turned out that love wasn’t a uniform rainbow
Arched the same thickness over lands and oceans.
That was hard enough, but even harder to let go
The stereotypes of rigid, unbending notions.
It was difficult to find its ultra-violet edges
The infra-red loving, all that’s invisible.
No smooth spectrum here, disjointed waves and wedges
And way out of earshot, just one whispered decibel.

It turned out that love wasn’t a rushing river

Trilling down the mountainside with its chant
Of what goes on, or doesn’t go on, forever.
It chose to dry up sometimes, nonchalant.
It was a shock at first, but more of a surprise
That even dehydrated it can hum a tune.
That it sings somehow, even though it dries,
Or suddenly stops into a lake or lagoon.

I’ve loved you more than I’ve cared to admit

Too much loving is also a character flaw.
It’s all about moving and rapid transit
To love one world and then quickly withdraw
Little to do with ultra-violet and infra-red
Banded into one single width of a rainbow
And listening for songs in a dried-up riverbed
And waiting for stagnant lake-waters to flow.

And I have loved you more than I’d like to write

In careful poems counting out the syllables
On parchment pages held up against dispersed light
Read low in whispers of uncertain decibels.
I have loved you in this arid desert dawn
And seen the entire possible serrated bandwidth
Without a drop of moisture. And where the sun has shone
Down on the dry river bed from its zenith.

Accented

Did you check out the harsh flaws in my accent,

And bring yourself to touch my different skin?
Were you dying to tell me whether it was meant?
That I should stand out here, or blend in.

Did you want to twist my tongue off at its root?

Because it spoke a different vowel sound
And turn down my voice.  Completely mute
The volume of dreams, both frivolous and profound.

Did you long to rip up my words? Break the spine
That held them together at the page’s edge
Erase everything that had come to be called mine
Simply because I spoke a different language?

The planet is my country: I shall not want

For voices and tongues. Or dreams that haunt.

From behind the wall

It gets said a lot, a door closes, a door opens,
Stuff that stifles also frees up, what’s the difference?
There are walls all around me, razor wires, scrap metal,
Porous stone and concrete, the ruins of a silence.

Did you come to me with a rose-petal velvet

Hope crimson at the edges? Well, don’t give up just yet.
Though the colours bleach as you move towards the centre
And though seeping away doesn’t quite mean quiet.

It gets thought a lot, and the balance of trust

Always quivers in the middle, and not just at first.
The black bend of bars showing up corners of sunlight
For exactly what it is, the broad slices, the cut and thrust.

Did you come to me thinking you’d be my freedom?

Or I’d add up and presently turn out the same sum.
And we’d sit matching the totals? Don’t discount it just yet.
But right now the fine needle trembles at lonesome.

It gets said a lot, but nothing really gets done.

The same doors close after they once creak open.
Did you come to me thinking some key was magical?
Don’t throw it out just yet.  But this is not the prison.
 

Nothing to show for it

I wear my pleated skin like the waves on a lakeshore,

My silence is the silence of many languages.
If there is no beginning, there cannot be an end;
No round pebble shaped words clinking into pledges
No dots between my brows, no conch at my wrist
No evidence at all to show what exists, exists.

But it does, and you can come anytime to me

To the curve of my armpits, to the hollows of my throat
The hardest diamonds and softest dough both have nestled
Between the spaces of my fingers, in the odd hollows of thought.
The creases of my eyelids have learnt only to wait
And made of it a religion, to change that now too late.

There is no beginning, there is no end

And you can come anytime to me
To the hammocks of my elbows as they hold and let go
To the folds of my skin like ripples in eternity.
I can’t promise any proof, of my faith, in you, or me.
This too may die someday, there is no guarantee.

You can choose to wander on complicated paths

Beset with hard riddles, and then come back and lie
With your temples on my collarbone, arm across my navel
Your breathless hand draped on my unselfconscious thigh.
Though I move with you, I always come to rest
Somewhere you can find me, obvious and easiest.

The planes of my faces set hard into ancient canyons

Soft, eroded dreams of twisted limestone.
There will be no end, because I can’t point at a beginning
Love has always been there, it hasn’t been worked at or grown,
Watered and watched over - a purple flowered vine
In a crack amongst the rockface.  It’s always been mine.

And yes, things may die even when not watched over

But you may come to me anytime and verify
The waiting hollows of my thoughts, like thumbprints on risen dough
Touch your lips to my life, rest your fingers on my thigh.
What’s begun before beginnings can only end after all ends
Love will always be there, but I offer you no evidence.

One of those random things

There are places, that you live in, or even visit, maybe frequently and get on very intimate terms with, and then you read stories set in those places.  And you’re like “yes, exactly, I know that crossing/coffee-shop that he’s talking about, he’s got it so exactly right, the atmosphere, my god!”  The book winds its way through the nooks and crannies of those places, the alleys, the shops, and you’ve seen them all, you know them all.   Even though the author might not have stuck to the exact same names, you can’t ever be tricked by that, you know the spaces there better than the back of your hand, who looks at backs of their own hands anyway?

And then there are stories that you read set in remote places which you’ve never been to, no-one in your family or even immediate circle has travelled there.  Read long years ago, and the details of the plots, the drama and the heartbreak, and the happiness of the endings even, have all escaped your memory.  The only things that are still crystal clear  are the features of the setting.  The feelings that the alleyways evoked as you read about them, or the creeks, or a certain way the sunlight fell on the incoming tide or between tree trunks one afternoon.  And nah, you don’t really expect to be able to visit and check it out yourself, how absurd is that?  But at the same time you can’t wait to get there and see for yourself without really even articulating that thought. 

However, you land up there finally.  Somehow.  After a little while or a lifetime. Of waiting or not thinking about it at all.  And the stories aren’t there but the feelings are exactly the same and it’s like you’ve come home already.  Though it’s your first time.  Maybe the only time.   But that’s not really important, what is paramount is that the sunlight is draping the tide in the exact same way, and the baobab or the weeping willow or daffodil or whatever looks uncannily like the one described in that book, what was its name again?  Maybe the author was sitting somewhere here when he got the whole idea of writing the stuff?

Finding unvisited places in the books you’ve read come alive in front of your eyes, and finding the places you’ve lived in and loved beautifully captured within the books you read.  Both so neat, such a rare thrill.  Seriously lucky if you've had both those fit into your one lifetime.

What they don't teach in language classes

A rose blooms over its thorn
And a dewdrop can hold the skies
I’ve read all that and I could have sworn
They’re inlaid into my eyes
Then why is hope suddenly forlorn
And my tissues feel like lies?

The migrants sing their normal tune

And I know it, every note.
The yearnings and the misfortune -
They’re layered inside  my throat
But still, a switch in an afternoon
Refuses to remix distraught.

The spiritual and the con

And I have seen them both
I’ve been the flame that burns on
And I’ve been the moth
But still, a sudden flare of dawn
Whispers something like an oath.

The thorns stay on after the rose

The poets never gave that a space.
The exiles sing, but some of those
Never find a home to embrace.
And they never said of hopes or woes
Which one’s easier to face.

Winter rain

Yesterday, all day long the rain fell
Like torrents of shredded marigold
Fall at small clay feet at the temple.
A little irreverent though, and a little cold.
Tapping out on the terrace, against mossy
Tiles crusted with years’ worth of heedless steps
Washing them in brisk movements and making them glossy.
The coming of winter, the passing of neglect.

I could hear it as I moved about the morning

Dotted with meaningless tasks, the sweep
Of dust from this corner to that, turning
Sleeves inside or outside of themselves, deep
In the maze of my ears, and over the corridors of thought
Broken into pieces by the sound of its whisper.
Even though most of it couldn’t be caught.
The voice of terraces overridden by the voice of the rainy winter.

I had heard it before, a bit of marigold rain

Falling untimely, tumbling with the yellowed, dry
Leaves, beyond the strict borders of the monsoons, a vein
Of lightning throbbing at the forehead of the sky
Many times, falling gentle like a temple offering
By truant schoolboys, a little cheeky yet a little afraid
Focussed obeisance for the terrible upcoming
Exams and beyond that all marigolds instantly mislaid.

But yesterday it spoke low and long of different things

As I moved particles around, dust from the floor
Into the hoover, from the bookcase to the duster so onto the bins
I knew I hadn’t heard the same whispers before.
I heard them only indistinctly, that chill, that irreverence
And all the spines stacked between my ribs and all the dust
Moved around uneasily like those boys in a short-lived obeisance
On the floor tiles of my terraces, scared but focussed.

Welcome 2012

It doesn’t seem too good -

A cyclone rounds off the year
Laying waste a certain neighbourhood.
It feels like mine, though it’s quite clear
That I am connected through
Only the most tenuous of ties.
Only because I happen to know you,
Whose faraway life now lies
Ruined over there. And no connection otherwise.
Nothing at all familiar.

The year has stood me along its edges

And in a minute will push what's left,
Regardless of the personal damages
Into the year that’s coming next.
And there are many neighbourhoods
That became flotsam on the tide
And losses of great magnitudes
Taken calmly  into stride
By distant lives on different sides
Of the world.  Not mine, nor even yours, derelict.

A feeling that won't be described, won't be reasoned

Away, its white width flagged
By the clenched fist of conviction
And joyfully dragged
Alongside me, its motifs blurred.
And tattered, but still brave
Enough to confidently stir
Hope, like a slogan-scribbled banner waves
High above the crushed debris, the edges, the graves.
The year’s going to be better, though it has lagged.