solitude

Yellow Rose

The night may be dark and long,
For when the muse comes to you,
Some words make no sense at all,
For I write to send you messages.

What if they cut up your raw vein,
Or punch an old pain that hurts?
For now, I have nothing else to do
But spin yarns to amuse you and me.

But when your absence hurts me,
As heartbeats from distant deserts,
They echo here and I cannot sleep
On any night or lull my restless mind

For they think of how in a moment,
A nameless feeling overruled me
And then you were looking at me
With a new surprise in your eyes.

Though I was so naive those days,
I know the reason that your love,
Echoes in some other heaven,
Safe in the heart of a yellow rose.

New Woman

 

This soul was once like a huge flame leaping to the skies,

Then it withered, dried and drooped to the very earth;

Sometimes, like Icarus, it leapt out of its many mazes,

But burnt out in the heady dash for total freedom.

Then she brought forth a new-born, a swaddled baby

She sang her magnificat of newly found motherhood;

The soul forgot its troubles for a joyous interval

And learnt how to escape the many mazes again.

Yet mostly this soul was a single-celled organism,

Cowardly and crawling in this huge universe,

Too silent, too shut out and too withdrawn,

Incapable of learning or making its way around,

Sometimes, it longs for the crazy days of yesterday,

When the sun of total freedom had burnt its wings.

Pic Courtesy: Icarus and the Sun by Serena-Moretti

Gershom

I'm a stranger in a strange faraway land,
His heart whispered to him night and day,
While his thoughts are full of a lovely face
That made him forgot all his troubles.

One that filled his solitude with quiet music
One that made him turn time by a few years
The longing for her sweet musical chitchats
Or the craving to bring back her last embrace.

All the while, his friends speak of their plans
He listens eagerly but wants to dream of her
Dream of the day when clad in bright red
And bedecked in jewels, she''ll be his bride.

She is the home he returns to time and again,
The dream that he looks forward every day
Even though his heart whispers to him daily
I'm a stranger in a strange faraway land.

dedication

Dreamer

Chingam

When the much-awaited Chingam is around
You and I enjoy our days of togetherness,
The scent of sweet jasmines on our bed
Your fingers undoing my long-braided hair.


The long heaps of my kasavu sari all crumbled
Along with your two yards of shiny kasavu mundu
The sweetness of these long waiting years
That finds its way into your limbs and mine.


We rest together after a sumptous onam feast
Amid smells of childhood and old boatsongs
That you sing in your sweet mellow voice,
To the snake-boats across the River Green.


When the spring is finally around for us both
We reign an ancient king and his demure queen.