Writing

Words leaped out of neatly bound and well-written books a long time back and became miracles in dark nights. Some writer, whose heart dribbled with love for a beloved set these words on paper, wove them with silence, longing and infinite love. May be the life-spirit that runs in all, whispered these intuitive life-lessons, through you, through the rain or the bright blue sky. 

I never knew this magic until one day; you came at midnight and peeked  in my dreams, with your gracious smile. Awake from your dreams, I wanted to tell you, with words like focused arrows on what ate my heart when you were not here. All the sighs, the tears, the smiles on how you spoke, smiled, walked and talked were mulled over again and again in those quiet moments of aloneness. Like a child with a favourite toy, I try to form with words; different games that might give you back to me, at least in an imaginary realm.  

This heart wants not to please the mob; only to sing about what hurts the most. These songs of silence have no art; they speak of the loss in not having you beside me. They have neither rhyme nor rhythm but only a wild beat of words that are quaint to the ear, yet in their own way, fresh-faced.  

Words come, with its thousand limbs, entangled meanings and nuances, like a sudden burst of rain that creates ripples in still water, while the great green forest holds watch over with its mighty silent wombs of understanding, from that moment when you came in my midnight dreams.  

Though I know that you will never set your eyes on these; for we come from two different worlds of understanding, I set before them engraved in a lovely script.

Heart of a Rose

Lie still, though the night
May be long and dark
For when the muse comes to you,
Words make no sense
And if they cut a vein
Or punch an old pain
How will I mend,
How will I send,
My love to you?

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

What else will I do,
When I have nothing else to do
But spin yarns and tall tales
To amuse you and lull myself
To sleep every night

For in one moment
A nameless feeling overruled
Every known feeling
You were looking at me
With surprise in your eyes

To answer that look
I must know the reason
And there is none
I can find except
That the feeling echoes
In some other place,
In the heart of this yellow rose.

Yellow Rose

You stand with your head high,
Smiling at tempests and winds,
Where was your mettle born,
From the sun, the earth or wind?

You have a lovely rival in love,
With a sceptre in her right hand,
Lovely foe, with eyes like a doe,
Who can but sing your praises?

A love that never was cannot fade,
Unlike one known and discarded,
From the fiery elements it was born,
From the ancient fire of ages.

Yellow rose, now sing me that song,
That you sing when you want to cry.

Another sacred space

Last year in February,the British Council closed its library in Trivandrum. For me, a regular visitor to the library, it was a big loss. Yes, there are other libraries but none to match this library in its vast collection of well-dusted and recently published books and the ambience of a sacred space.

For reading books on English literature as well as on other subjects, this was the ideal place. I used to feel so happy with six books and three journals to savour for may be month.

Mine was a children's membership. Where else will you get to read Harry Potter, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (as you know made into a movie as The Chronicles of Narnia), Roald Dahl, Ruskin Bond, Epics, illustrated books (I love books with pictures, even now) on Greek legends, history, planets, biology, anything.

Still, I haven't been able to find a replacement for that thrill, that spark of inspiration and that thirst for knowledge I used to feel on a day after my visit to the library.

My Home

This is the place where my dreams learnt how to fly
This is the place where I blossomed into a youth
This is where my heart grew in pain and joy.
Like a human heart, this is my home
Goodbye my home of four long years
Before I go I have  treasured each and every part of you
Before I leave you I say for sure
That though I may come back
It will not be the same as now.
Time would have changed me and you
You’d no longer miss my laughter and tears
You’d no longer miss the way I make this place alive
New voices will take my place
Yet I know for sure even now
That you will always be the home I love
Because this is where I have learnt to live. 

Musings

A good piece of writing makes the reader curious. How did the writer write this? Was it based on some life experience of the writer? Or is just fantasy? Will I be able to write like this?

Plenty of books are available on how to become a writer. But a point raised against the authors of most of these how-to books is that they are not great in the sense Shakespeare or Rushdie or Keats are. May be they have written books that nobody reads but they have succeeded in writing the book and getting it published as well. These writers emphasise the importance of persistence.

This fact is quite opposing to the myth of a creative artist who puts pen to paper and thus creates a masterpiece without any previous effort. While studying the great writers, it is found that these writers constantly wrote and rewrote their words, researched more and more about their subject matters and themes, played with associations of ideas and the intricacies of language, to create a collage that became a complete work of art.