The coucal traipses off, again

This isn't that great a photo. I have been lucky enough to take better ones of the Coucal (crow pheasant) incidentally the bird that is also the logo of my publishing house, Coucal Books.

But this photograph to a certain extent illustrates what makes it so tough to photography this amazingly shy, suspicious and reclusive bird.

For the rest of the mystique of the experience, there is this poem (first draft, and untitled, as of now) as well.

As if it has heard a rustle
from the laboured focus of my gaze;
the Coucal traipses off, again

In an ungainly, tail-heavy tiptoe
up through tree storeys
all russet stealth, a streaky

Rust and black shadow of light
a poem shying away, alarmed
into the wordless escape of flight,

Gone, again.

Somewhere in the lush foliage of poems that is Ink Dries, there is one that is on the Coucal's predilection to slink away. But this one has a individuality entirely of its own and a big dose of immediacy as well. 

P.S. No, I did not type it up in my cellphone (shudder shudder). And I do hope I do not end up losing this blog as well.
        

 

That familiar cycle of silence

Mine is not a very chronological way of living; I don't even wear a watch and there is a lot that is unstructured, persistently footloose and itinerant in my life. I could say it isn't exactly by choice, but then it doesn't really matter in the overall scheme of things -- does it? For it would seem that that is how my life would unravel in time -- in a not very chronological way.

Yes, all I can say is that I have been here earlier.

That this has happened to me earlier.

And that, it is stunning, bordering the nerve-wracking.

I am an ear (of course not speaking literally -- ha ha, certainly not in my case) with all my faculties, eye and very being, but the silence has settled down to roost and will not go away.

And after all the hope, the tribulations, the fears and the skating on the thin ice of fast melting dignity and self-respect, after being turned out in the cold the realization dawns, once again.

Maybe the blame lies in me after all, for being a fool -- believing in being myself and trying.

And then again, like before there isn't much to show for all the trying, apart from this familiar cycle of silence that seems to haunt me, seems to literally cloak me in it and verges on being as pervasive as a tinnitus in the head -- a silence that will not go away.

Hello again, silence -- please forgive me, I will not try to go away from your embrace again.