THE DOOR

This thing
wakes me like a hand.

Grass waits

and rock
takes the wind's place.

Huge door
drifting
with feet of light,

my eyes
quietly open
before the night's.

-- Jayanta Mahapatra

(From "The False Start" )

A DAY OF RAIN

Once again, it has been a day of rain.
And I hear the flutter of light feet
on the warm earth, excited wings
loosening from the dark. There's
a summer hiding away behind the hills,
a haunting dream whose meaning
always escapes me,
like the sad shut tufts of mimosa,
hanging there tame and weeping
for the lost touch.
What thin air your face is now,
now that I touch it? Out here,
the stupid code of the crickets,
the wind's low whine; who knows
what's dying underneath
a growing blade of grass?
Or what habit palpitates
inside the dark pit of love:
art, ceremony or voice that lies
under my aimless hearing of the rain?

-- Jayanta Mahapatra

(From "The False Start" )

On being Anand Vishwanadha

It would seem I am now living through Ver 4.0 of a "life of a'mour"

But then like there are stories you will never tell (especially because a lot of stories are but the assigning of blame, something that I was never good at as can be gathered by my troubled days in a corporate) and there are delusions of grandeur you will never crown yourself with -- that is, if you are Anand Vishwanadha.

So then, maybe I should qualify that as "a life of a'mour not really amorous".

Then again, how does it matter -- its a story that I wouldn't tell anyway.

What matters is that there are so many birds out there; what's some time, some money, some heartbreaks and some derailed dreams worth (even with their attendant opportunity costs), life's still for the living, even if solely by dint of eye.

Greenshank

Greenshank

His single note -- one can't help calling it
piping, one can't help
calling it plaintive -- slides droopingly down
no more than a semitone, but is filled
with an octave of loneliness, with the whole sad scale
of desolation.

He won't leave us. He keeps flying
fifty yards and perching
on a rock or a small hummock,
drawing attention to himself.
Then he calls and calls
and flies on again
in a flight
roundshouldered but dashing,
skulking yet bold.

Cuckoo, phoenix, nightingale,
you are no truer emblems
than this bird is.
He is the melancholy that flies
in the weathers of my mind,
He is the loneliness that calls to me there
in a semitone
of desolate octaves.

-- Norman MacCaig

(From "THE POETRY OF BIRDS" Ed. -- Simon Armitage and Tim Dee)

{Enlightening -- how the poet (evidently a birder in his own right) doesn't use "Common" in the title and how he uses "He" (instead of "he") in the third stanza. Almost as if the poem addresses someone divine.}

Three poems from Ink Dries

Kartik Purnima, 2009

A white hole
for milky light
the full moon
at its high noon
has sucked out
winking starlight
leaving the black hole
of the skies
of this night
when the day's named
after the moon
a Neelkanth blue
with which time
auspicious minutes writes.

***********

Camouflage

Half of earth and half of sky,
these colours
blue and brown me,
clothing me in camouflage
for bird and butterfly eye.

While of what can be heard
the spoor that breaks my trail
is a tread mocassined
by the stillness of my soul

And the zephyrs of the chase.

***********

Ink Dries

For my ears,
these words voice
nothing more than a nib's scratch
as pen touches paper.

I write,
but out of habit;
its smell therapeutic, liberating
with a swirl of light

On the blue of seas
ink dries

Into seen meanings.

(Three poems from my second book -- Ink Dries. Because, today is World Poetry Day)

After the babel of the city

Like a dysfunctional hearing aid,
my room's all silent, again
its metal sheet roof,

A thin membrane, humming
its silence into the twin ears,
bottomless...night and sky.

Then, that other silence,
a quiet, a brooding
that defeats all voice, overflows

From a loyal residence in my soul
tumbling pell-mell, incoherent,
like refrains never heard.

I smile, content
it is good to be home conversing
in silence with old friends.

As a hazy March sun sets

My two eyes,
skywards rise,
in that artless search
to hear unvoiced answers
why this hazy light
when the evening should golden blaze
why this wispy soft, finely spread
gossamer skein of cloud
with the rains still months away
then, the sun I see
for what it is, a third eye mortal as me
and this sky too,
is of me, my brow smudged
with thoughts and dust,
creased with the crowfeet
of all these footloose days.