TWO

Two little mynahs

sitting on a  hedge:

One for sorrow,

Two for joy.

A little girl who believed

in fairy tales,

Blue lotuses lived

in her midnight eyes.

Bread and butter,

Woe and mirth,

Lightning and thunder,

Breath and death.

Life is measured out in pairs—

A duet tuned to disaster:

Two tablespoons, please.

What do you do with a poem

whose couplets

refuse to rhyme?

Would you tear it up

into a million flakes

that snow down upon

your summers and springs?

Would you torch it alive,

Let the howls hound you for life?

Would you incinerate it,

Scatter the ashes

beneath your dreams?

Or would you keep rewriting

till your blood runs dry

and you run out of reams?

A sunrise frozen in a teardrop,

A bulrush gasping in a heath,

A forlorn slice of moon in a bedraggled sky,

Some couplets can never rhyme.

Education for Life

I waddle daily

to the carefree laughter

of youth—freshly flowered—

beneath the casuarinas,

The staccato banter and songs

drifting down the corridors,

The brightly sparkling eyes

that gaze upon endless vistas,

The polite smiles and good-mornings.

You kick and twist and drag me down,

rippling beneath my pulled-down dupatta,

Altering my life’s centre of gravity;

But I brush away the cobwebs and smile,

Acknowledge their greetings,

Maybe in memory of days

not long ago when I too

was one of them.

They say of woman:

Born weak,

And on top, pregnant.

I say:

Born strong,

And on top, forged in fire.

I see the passion

pulsing in their veins,

The dreams

that deck their hair,

The stars in their eyes.

Not so far removed in age,

But alas! I care no longer

for the sprezzatura

of roses and cards

and chocolates

and moonlit verses

and all that jazz.

I talk to them of human frailty

and mortality,

And beauty and infinity;

I teach them the nightingale’s rhapsody,

The desire to cease upon

the midnight hour with no pain,

To soar upon the viewless wings of poesy;

Metre and alliteration, stress and sprung rhythm,

Dialect and diglossia.

I see their eyes glaze over, some of them,

Lost in illusory enchanted lands . . .

I wish I could gently shake them

and teach them

The clanging, jarring

onomatopoeia

of reality,

The falling tone of vanity and ideals

and hopeless romance,

The enjambement of disillusionment,

The deconstruction of truth.

But then I know I mustn’t.

I must let them feel it, taste it, live it

for themselves.

For what is life, if not these brief preludes

before grimness punctures the heart

and greyness punctuates your laughs?

If not the steely resolve that rises

like a phoenix to soar over the ruins

of the present to swoop down on that

liminal land of luminosity

that lies between knowledge and despair?

And I know that is what I must teach

these tender blooms before winter comes,

And you, my child, in the years to come.