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.

MATURITY

You say I have matured,

Well, maybe...

But-

Ripened by Experience,

Weathered by Age,

Tempered by Time,

Or beaten by Life?

A Lament

You tell me not to mourn

The passing of the morn;

That brighter dawns

Of brighter morrows

Hover in the east,

That similar gilted sunshine

Still shall streak my life.

Oh, can't you see,

I cry for these moments

That slip from my hands

Like grains of sand,

The harder I try to hold on,

Not because I don't know

The shores still stretch on;

Not because I fear

There shall no more be light.

It's just that I know

The sunshine shall never again be the same-

You are wrong there-

It may be brighter

Or duskier,

But it can never ever be the same.

The cadences of our laughter,

The notes of our song,

Shall never be the very same;

No, the sunshine shall never

Be just this bright again.

And that's why I ache

As these moments march fast

To the twilit past-

Memories that fade like the hues of sunset.

That's why I wish,

Futile though it be,

To slow down their procession

To Eternal Nothingness;

Or better still, sprinkle on them stillness.

For, once gone, I know,

They are forever lost-

Irretrievably lost.

Irreplaceably lost.

Because the sunshine shall never

Be just this bright again.

GARBAGE

Here, hold my heart,

I’m much better off

Without this throbbing pain,

Without this need to love and to feel,

To laugh and to bleed.

Here, take my heart;

I’m much better off

In a static scorching summer

Sans emotion and all;

The colourful spring

Of blossom and birdsong,

Leads but to a melancholy autumn

Of smiles turning yellow and brown,

And falling off my life

With hardly a sound-

Like the tears from my eyes,

And ending in a frozen winter

Of perennial pain.

Here, hold my heart,

Please take it and leave,

And just dump it

In the nearest trash bin

You find, thank you.

FINE PRINT

This love has grown mouldy,
Left neglected in the monsoon,
Got rusty with disuse.
Words tender and true at the time,
With stony silence now turned stale-
Our perfect symphony
Long decayed into cacophony,
Memories of Heaven before Hell do pale...
Worm-eaten dreams and cankerous vows-
So much for our garden-fresh love!

Delivered in a bright blue carton,
Bought at an exorbitant price,
From that cheerful chubby lad
In the store down the street;
Sigh! Our hard-earned time
Gone down the drain!

"Sorry, madam, I’m afraid nothing
Can be done about it," said the lad
Politely, cheerful as ever,
When the unsatisfactory product
I thrust on the counter.
"The affection, I agree, has curdled,
The happiness has rotten, the memories mouldy;
But the pain, the hurt, the bleeding wound,
Are still so fresh, as we promised."

Cursing myself, I returned dejected-
I should have read the fine print
On that bright blue carton
Of garden-fresh love.

Guest Post on Shravan's Blog (Ephemeral Eternity)

Shravan is a fellow-blogger my best friend introduced to me- a very creative guy brimming with intensely original and innovative ideas.I was quite taken aback- I mean, pleasantly surprised- when he asked me to do a guest post on his blog. It was indeed an honour... Thank you Shravan! To see the post i contributed, click here

The Chasm Between

Now there's no right, no wrong-
What does it matter?
No I, me, you, we...
In a broken-hearted spasm;
Only an unbridgeable chasm
That shows
Where once I thought
No crack could grow.

How Far?

How far, I asked,
A stranger on the road,
From Love to Hate,
From a smile to tears.

Not much, replied
The helpful man,
Pointing the way:
Just go five steps straight,
Past a careless word or two,
A thoughtless deed-
And you reach where you want.

Old is Gold

Yesterday, while rummaging
Through Memory’s dark attic,
I came across an old love-
Dusty, sooty, grubby…and old.

But when with weary heart
And trembling hands,
I brushed the cobwebs away;
Wiped off the smudge
Of wasted years and tears,
I found it still shining,
Splendid as ever before-
Old indeed is gold.