POEMS
POEMS
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Answer Maa
The day you hid the door of afterlife -- Earth, flames and ashes erased the apprehensions allying illusion and reality. I still sense your presence around that door but a sound from this opening seems like an echo in the wilderness -- warning as well as bewitching me to reveal myself to the untraveled. Still for my senses, like a deserted impala calf -- I am hurling questions and calls to the woods, drowsy in meditation. Maa, I know you won’t answer. I am therefore standing soaking myself trying to find answers in the undertone of this rain falling on the tin house. In a skirmish with anxiety my wakefulness is waiting to meet sleep in person [if she has heard you somewhere.] Answer Maa Or what’s the purpose of perpetuating the thirst of my eyes Tears are digging deep inside a canyon of remembrances is getting drilled. Answer Maa. Nobody Speaks of You Syria
You have shrunk to a handful of wet dust-- wet from tears and rapacious semen. The heralds look at you as a whore and your screams have no walls to enclose their echoes. All have fallen. Your ovaries are dead. Your ribs have turned into razors wiping out your sentiments. The bullets you have consumed have rusted inside your womb and stained the colour of your blood. Civilization looks as blank as a dry river that doesn’t thirst for rains. Somewhere in your ruins, hope peeps like a thief through a broken tooth of a child, smiling at a broken tank. Through her eyes-- You look so lean Syria, but your history is getting fat. |
To Syrian Children
You all are culpable— for wending your way to schools for going to hospitals, for playing in open spaces and for keeping at your dreams within a country in rags. Yes, you never knew that you would be going down with a fever that would burn your fleshes into a universal white fume— blooming in newspapers. But, liven up the carcasses now. You wanted to be in suits like Putin or Obama; look what have you ended up with-- a sweat of literate talks in a ground of experimentation. The handsome presidents have osculated you goodbye. Now burn yourself completely, or they would light cigarettes out of you, blaming you for the cancer rampant in air. Don’t let yourselves counted — history will be framed without you. You won’t smell good like those dead woods and leaves, so vanish with the fumes and transform yourself into water-- it would fulfil your hope — of staying away from fire and desire to wash blind eyes. The Unborn ones, please retreat to your mother’s womb The mouths of guns are shouting outside. Wait till they have the ear to celebrate your first cry. - Seduced in the Sunderbans Blue above, blue beneath; waters and skies kiss at yonder point. A thick line stretches with flags of greenery, bold enough to sustain salty tides, as muddy lands, bronze in sunrays swathe itself with the poignant carpet of the Ganges. Boatman swings as if wind itself in the unheard stretches. Vista lucid enough but not to overcome eyes in the clay. Death lies behind the muck and life too; they choose to struggle. Nights alert through sounds; river breezes rumour in our ears- “Look the ‘Royal’ sees you from behind, from beside, in front...” Fake cries of people tilts the launch as feet gather on a side just to beat hope against the blinding trees and bushes. We hover in coop while roars roam around us in the chill captivating mist dangle themselves over salty fluids, blurring reality in the splendour that seduces us with drunken eyes. Word-masters may faint penning it from tip to tail for Where is the tip and where is the tail? Scintillating silence- Winded by the recurrent chirping and seldom fox cries and the wish to see the king, bothering every moment makes the guards utter, If seen within the cage it’s royal, For those who dare to sense it and hear it’s gasp, it’s lethal. Verses bow, prose too - ideas too vast for them. Logs of wood keep us alive till they rot, afloat in them till they float, Nature’s dearest are the ‘Royals’ here. Her lap just for them. Eyes become weary, swollen without sleep, still open with hope while the king dozes and watches us every jiffy through royal eyes. He must be smiling seeing the hunters enslaved within inebriated waters. A serene approval haunts the heart as we depart, kicks the pendulum faster to say, Come here and float but beware of seduction. Notes:-
- Blue-Collar Twister Sweat tries to swim upwards through the hairs of a labourer building the statue of the herald but fails and falls in the soil sucked up by heat, Vanishes as a struggling animal in quicksand; Dreams drain and entity turns into fossils as slippers walk over it. His weapons are a chisel and spade; He lifts them to protest but vacuum wailing in the curves of his muscles make it fall again on the mummified ground; just to dig, dig the ground for the Herald's statue must stand firm or his existence will be buried under its falling weight... Toils will evaporate with the smile of the moon The dawn will hear sounds again- sounds of iron striking against rocks. The air waits to weave those sounds and strike a twister with them- Tall enough for the world to see bold enough to step over mountains Clear enough to show the waving hands begging a day out of slavery. - Unusual Shiver in Winter Days She was a creeping winter,- coiling and settling into the wardrobe of my lined collections of cassettes and clothes (Scattered in a bachelor’s room) Suits arranged by brands fragranced by sensuous nights brought by you molded me into a gentleman below uncombed hairs and unwashed hands. I was into lessons to be clean while I was feeding on my love. From a scrappy life beside a pond abound with weeping cranes she was the only fish in front of my hungry beaks. Short-lived and destructive as most pleasures are I am wedged back back into an untidy shiver from an act worthy of no mercy. |
