Why you won't find a poem here today

 

Sometimes a dove will sit on the railing

and swivel its head, very canny, very wise -

late afternoon and the light’s quietly failing

but something breath taking happens to the skies.

A high rigged truck will come around trailing

its discordant sounds topped by pneumatic sighs

and leave a fluorescent silence where words die

drop out defeated however hard they try.

 

Ordinary events of urban landscapes -

a flash of coloured scarf, a certain note

of moonlight and the changing shadow shapes.

The calligraphic wakes of a speedboat

mirrored by migrant flamingos as they fly.

Sometimes the words just won’t fit - that’s why.

Because on my feed there’s an image of a foggy morning in Safdarjung

 

I once knew a tree - a long time ago –

as I walked by she used to sigh over me,

she formed the backdrop to a favourite photo,

starlight was filtered through her canopy.

 

I knew her bark, her long-tailed leaf shadows,

the sounds and textures of storms in her limbs,

the comings and goings of doves and sparrows,

the poetry of her seasons verbatim.

 

It’s been a long time since I’ve left her shade,

years since I’ve felt her sigh on my commutes.

All memories, glorious or not, must fade,

all leaves diverge away from their roots.

 

But even so. They’re made of the same sap.

And her fogged image is a happy recap.

You know how life sometimes feels like one of those painter's shade cards? - with little square patches from every shade of terrible to awful to merely bad, and yet you're still awestruck by it because it still looks all kinds of amazing overall?  Well, that's my life right now, and that image of a fogged up, eerie tree in a winter morning in Delhi was beyond feel-good.

Recede

 

Original image by Herz Albanki

The land recedes. The earth’s mostly water.

Non-potable. Saline. Right now - serene.

So are humans - mostly made of liquid,

bubbles of fluid enclosed in a skin -

takes some time to figure what waters mean.

All lands recede. Winter days are shorter.

And the pandemic has emptied them clean.

A single parasol stands out vivid,

the boat’s moored, but ready to loosen,

to draw away through the ultramarine,

draw to the dock. Maybe less off the grid.

But home, when it gets there, feels too foreign -  

the streetscapes changed, the city lights too lurid.

Takes time to see what home and moorings mean.

I visited a (socially distant) photography exhibition recently, where three Bahraini photographer-artists were exhibiting their work - a great way to start off 2021, though now it seems to have lapsed back into 2020 mode again. Anyways. 

This image by Herz Albanki, a well known photographer-artist who exhibits regularly in Bahrain and internationally, prodded the above verse. Herz has been my art partner for the BWC annual exhibition Confluence all through, I've been majorly privileged to work with his images as prompts for my poetry there. His work always inspires, there is a 'certain slant of light' to his photography that just makes the words pour out! He showcases the land and seascapes of Bahrain, its working population, its flora and fauna in all their profound ordinariness and diverse magnificence. This particular artwork is called 'Jarada Island.' Bahrain is an archipelago of mostly natural and a few manmade islands. Isn't the planet beautiful?

This is the thing with feathers...

 

A couple of days in and the wing feathers

are already bedraggled; the weather

is strangely warm when it should have been cold

- summer in winter.  The year is just days old.

 

Somewhere the light’s dying. Somewhere icy winds

have knifed trees. More grace than can be imagined

even in the unkempt, in the shady light -

the rims of hope and grace are seldom watertight.

 

The anglers are gone, the fishing boats are back,

sun’s in its rightful place in the zodiac.

Waiting for the bones to move a bit less smooth

the flesh to peel away and reveal the truth –

 

that feathers, shaggy or not, knifed trees and all

remain beautiful however the light falls.

Yearning

 

I yearn to write you a poem

that when you read you don't stumble

on the raised fists and frowns of phrases

on hairpin bends and sharp angles

not even a downturn of a comma

and don't skid to a stop anywhere

blinking in too harsh a sunlight.

And as you read - those stanzas

fall like toes dipping into the river

fringed cool with low hanging branches.

Like a cocoon spun of afternoons

and pigeon throated iridescence.

Like mountain mists you breathe in

as you move through them they vanish

deep inside your membranes.

By the time you get to the end

it's bound fast to your pith

it's coursing through you gently

so easy in your channels

that you feel it was yours always

in this life and the previous

and all the unlived ones to come

for all eternity.

Finale

 

Still my mind and teach me to hear

the absence of a stream

the sparkle of air, crystal clear

the outline of a dream

still my mind and teach me to read

the red lines behind the gauge  

give me the skillsets that I need

to deink and strip this page

open me up to the noughts hidden

in the maze of days and nights

the trees and music, tinsel, ribbons

the spectra of festive lights

teach me to grow through colours and shapes

of silence, absence and voidscapes.

So...that's the final word. It's been a relentlessly hard year, glad to see the back of it. Thank you for your support and your time, here and on the other platforms of engagement. Wishing you a joyful, peaceful and healthful New Year 2021. 

Not a Pie

 

The heart’s not a pie, but how convenient

that it’s sliced into four, that it can hold

different concentrations of oxygen

simultaneously. Degrees untold

of love and thankfulness and resentment

together and apart, correctly controlled,

disparate, immiscible, vast oceans.

 

How fortunate that it can celebrate

and grieve at the same time. It can contain

brimming tears, and itself. Yet cascade

joy, radiate peace, friendship. Entertain

opposable thumbs of thoughts with innate

ease. It can loathe clouds but still love the rain,

petrichor, bedewed grass, the shade of shade.

Write... Edit... Publish... December 2020 : Unmasked

 

For this month, Write... Edit... Publish... is  taking a much needed break and getting its collective breath back. No winners, no comment counts, no prize badges this month - no pressure. This posting is for the spirit of community only - which is what has kept me going through this annus horribilis. The online and offline support of my various communities. A huge thanks to the WEP members for all that you did.      

Mind. Mandate. Missteps.

Sometimes it’s not the people who change, it’s the mask that falls off. ~ Haruki Murakami.

 

This year has forced nearly all of us to wear masks, like it or not. Masks are often associated with extreme attributes - positive and/or professional (health workers/firemen/anonymous benefactors) or massively negative (robbers). The pandemic has shown how uneasy we are when we cannot access facial cues to communicate, for all that eyes are said to be the windows to the soul. A mask is really a trade off - between power, protection and concealment, and we're not always outwardly comfortable with the balance struck. 

Cleaning the case

 

The sunset’s like a chromatograph

the pinks travel faster than blues.

I’m clearing the clutter from my bags

decades of paper residues -

foldable maps that fit in wallets

from trips in far places, now collapsed

loose currencies in zippered pockets,

coupons of the vanished and lapsed.

Clean darkness wipes out the mess of clouds,

my cases too are stripped of stubs,

the pocket corners duly turned out

the labels off, the metal rubbed.

Yet there’s a faint patch - that stubborn glue

just won’t come off whatever I do.

Post-Diwali

 

It’s happened before that I haven’t put up

lamps for Diwali. The winds, grief or love

have stopped the flames and the darkness has been

my deep solace and festival enough.

 

It’s an odd goddess that discriminates

and does not step in through unlit gates.

Does her omnipotence flail in the dark?

Does her third eye need lights to navigate?

 

Surely those who could not afford the oil,

the homes left dark by personal turmoil   

have the greatest need for the gods to step in,

lift faith and fortune rather than recoil.

 

I’ll continue to let emotions strike

the match, the gods too may step where they like. 

Star fall

 

Time spots the mirror and the photograph,

creates the marks and also wipes them away.

A silver moon statue, mug of half-n-half;

a much loved profile, a rather well known laugh

tapers and stills. Dead flowers in a bouquet

make their way to the river piled on the hearse

and a certain star shaped void’s our universe.

 

What will patch it up, make good the damage -

no-one has a clue, no-one takes a guess

the wise men proclaim so, all the poets pledge

wait for the ones to come, they’ll be cutting edge;

but now’s a gun salute, now’s a grieving mess

for every star must fall, even stars must fall.

The universe must shrink to a star shaped hole.

The Heft of Memory

 

I think of you at odd times, the templates

are not a convenient protocol –

and sometimes I don’t think of you at all

as the mind hardly differentiates

 

between the minute grains, the separate heft

of conscious and unconscious memory.

Every time I return to a story

you’re in it somewhere, to the right or left

 

of each chapter. And the city spools in

your laughter like an angler’s line, your face

a mirage of leaf shadows, just a faint trace

of your voice when the peak hour traffic thins.

 

In every courtyard I visit, every square,

in every vanished landmark - you’re there.

Tar and Cement and Javed Akhtar

 

Go back to the stream where paper boats plied

after school, where a plume of smoke rose alone

over the wood that was the entire hillside –

that’s now a resort, every inch occupied.

Rows of crafts for water sports, mobile phone

ads, leftover hoardings from spring sales, rides

on animals and machines. The hillside’s gone.

The busker coaxing tunes from a flute - the old folk

have vanished like that single plume of smoke.

 

Go back to those villages of childhood

you’ll find cities settled there now, yellow lined

roads ordering your movements. Panicked, crude

graffiti in public spaces. Turn and look, you’ll find

nothing of the hillside you’d left behind.

Javed Akhtar is a contemporary Indian poet who writes in Urdu, I was listening to some of his poetry - tum apne qasbon mein jaake dekho/wahan bhi ab shehr hi basein hain - the lines reminded me of this song 

...and from there the above lines kind of diffused out. Not that I am saying ubanisation or tourism should not happen and we should all go back to drawing water from borewells and threshing grain manually and so on. Sustainable progress is what I'm after, if you know what I mean. :) Have a good November, and a great NaNo, those who're going for it. Keep safe, keep calm, keep fit.

Write...Edit...Publish... + IWSG October 2020 : Grave Mistake

 

Cutting straight to the chase without the usual preliminaries, in keeping with the spirit of WEP Lite...

Blind Mole in a Black Hole

To be or not to be, that is the question…

~ Hamlet, William Shakespeare.

 

Mistakes. Grave ones. Yes, the mind makes them. The shape-shifting wondrous and wondering mind, capable of morphing from a homing pigeon to grasshopper and bulldog, capable of holding the most unimaginable thoughts, the most inexplicable, avantgarde visions, the most speakable and unspeakable ideas – that exact same mind can summersault and do a strange blind-mole-in-black-hole on itself. The same mind, which can drive the body to achieve peak success, can also torment it and goad it to blow its brains out or immolate its living self on a pyre. It can, in one catastrophic, grave moment, destroy its own housing and so annihilate itself.

 

Suicide - it’s as old and as human as civilisation itself. The first recorded suicide note goes back to 1900 BCE to Ancient Egypt (even this started in Africa, why am I not surprised?) – it is housed in a museum in Berlin and its title translates as The Dispute with His Soul of One Who is Tired of Life. Attitudes to life and death and the taking of life, whether by own hand or by some other means, were different in antiquity – some would call it more callous, some fatalistic, some maybe relaxed. It was not abhorrent in many societies. The pagan world was generally less hassled about suicide than we are now.

For instance, some Ancient Greek states allowed citizens to end their own life with a state sponsored cup of hemlock, if the said citizen dotted the ‘i’s and crossed the ‘t’s correctly in the application form. In general, suicide was frowned upon if it was uneconomic for the society, such as slaves or criminals prior to trial (criminals forfeited their property to the state). But suicide was perfectly acceptable if the alternative was a dishonourable death. 

In North Western India, Rajput women followed the practice of Jauhar, a ritual mass immolation, when defeat in battle became inevitable for their menfolk, so as not to be taken alive and abused by the enemy.  The first Jauhar is said to date back to Alexander’s time when some north western tribes committed mass suicide to avoid certain capture by him. Similarly insurgent Jews in Masada committed mass suicide rather than face capture and enslavement by the Romans in 74 CE. Famous individual suicides from antiquity include Cleopatra VII and Seneca the Younger.

With the rise of Christianity, attitudes towards suicide hardened and the practice became unacceptable. Suicide became stigmatised. The church excommunicated those who attempted it and the bodies of successful suicides were not permitted burial on consecrated grounds.  That started changing again during the Renaissance and by 18^th/19^th century the cause of suicide had stopped being perceived as sin and instead shifted to insanity, though it remained illegal in most of the world. Suicide was decriminalised in most countries in the 20^th century. However, there is still much stigma attached to it.

***

It is better to burn out than to fade away.

~ Kurt Cobain.

Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, John William Godward, Mark Rothko, Robin Williams, Sushant Singh Rajput. Is there something within the artistic temperament that predisposes it to suicide? Does the creative brain come hardwired with the seeds of its own annihilation? There have been reams of studies out to prove or disprove this premise. No definitive answer, though. What has been established is a connection between mental health and suicidal behaviour. Our understanding of so called ‘insanity’ has deepened. But it has also become equally clear that mental disorders are not the only cause, the reasons are varied and many. We now know that there are signs of suicidal tendencies long before the person takes any definitive action to end life. Suicide prevention is possible if communities are sensitive - they listen and act proactively.  

 

Worldwide, there are around 800,000 lives lost to suicide annually. These are only the recorded deaths, many are suppressed due to the stigma or to avoid legal issues, so likely the actual figures are much higher. A majority are males, it is estimated that twice as many men take their own lives as women.  Not all have any history of mental health issues and/or substance abuse, although it is thought that in more than 50% of the cases depression/mental health/drugs have a role. Other causes of suicide include financial distress, romantic and academic/professional disappointments, terminal disease. In nearly all of the cases, the suicide is to avoid the resulting torment rather than to end life per se.

 

In the last decade or so, suicides among younger people have shown a disturbing, upward trend globally. The current pandemic has created its own horrific spike as well – in India for instance, suicides have risen among the youth in all segments due to job losses and academic uncertainties, for all that the public has been obsessed with the particular high profile suicide of Bollywood celebrity Sushant Singh Rajput recently. 

In some ways, a suicide of this kind opens up a whole can of worms about the wider society it happens in. What it has revealed about Indian society is not pretty. What is even more regrettable is that there were hardly any serious conversations on any of the underlying issues, instead the whole spiralled into a misogynistic witch hunt, trial by social media and an avalanche of hashtags. 

It is not just the suicidal mind that makes grave mistakes, unfortunately. The mindless public in many cases makes equally grave ones. A picking over of things in which all sense of privacy and decency are lost. Shameful!

***

Each one of us leaves an unfinished life.

~ Mary Oliver.

But that’s neither here nor there. Because this here is not about an error of the present, but one of the long ago past. A grave mistake that robbed the world of a genius. Whose mistake was it? And how did it come to be made? We still don’t know (WC 1000. FCA.)

Lime and sandal

 

The kaffir lime’s canopy in G-block -

my mother’s friend grew it in her backyard

and broke off a few every time I went there

and gave them to me, but always in pairs,

the empress of fragrance, acid green and hard

their smell lingered, like sandal incense smoke

used in her shrine and down the lane somewhere.

Just a small, unpaved patch, yard’s too grandiose

there we played in the mud, her child and I

and there was the first tree I saw up close,

learnt what leaves, barks and seasons signify -

perfume entire lanes as the canopy grows.

Houses. And childhoods. Discrete blocks of time

characterised by sandal and kaffir lime.

I've finally managed to travel back home - the pandemic has meant the skies were shut for the last six months. Home leave is never easy but this one is a level of difficulty all by its own self...back here again on Wednesday for the fear fest October Challenge of Write...Edit...Publish...  See you soon.